It’s just bad. It was considered a bad film from day one and flopped totally at the box office. It was chosen for midnight shows because it was bad.
It was one of the most important social events of my geek life.
Therefore, I vote it GREAT.
The part where Riff-Raff sings the “darkness must go down the river of night’s dreaming” is quite evocative and I still remember even after all of these years.
So bad it’s terrible.
I’m in the so-good-it’s-great camp myself, and I’m gratified to see I’m not alone. I saw it on video at home by myself the first time I watched it, and I loved it. I was genuinely surprised when I started to hear so-called fans of the movie aver that watching it like that is a waste of time, the movie itself sucks, all the fun is in the audience participation, etc. Any movie could be made enjoyable by having audience participation. Hell, the whole premise of MST3K and RiffTracks is that the worse the movie, the more fun you can have adding comments from the peanut gallery. But RHPS became an audience participation movie because it already perfectly captured the snarky, winking, gleefully anarchistic and subversive humor that audience participation thrives on.
If it really was bad, you would have directed it. 
I think it succeeds in what it’s trying to do. By that measure it’s good. Now that’s obviously not to everyone’s taste, but I think it’s fun.
Could I just replace my OP with this? 
I concur.
It’s not like Plan 9 where the director was completely clueless about how to make an effective movie and botched things so much that it’s hilarious that someone actually thought it was worth releasing. Any “mistakes” there might be in RHPS are almost certainly intentional. The makers of the film knew what they were making, and for the most part did a decent job. There are some parts that fall flatter than others, but for the most part the “bad” is so obviously intentional that it’s amusing. If you don’t see what’s so funny about that, you either aren’t familiar what it’s parodying or just aren’t in its target audience.
Yes, it was during her uber-skank phase. She also made The Hunger during this period. Seriously- she blossomed into a beautiful woman and she is a terrific actress, but back then… skanky.
To each his own. I found her attractive in a fresh, wholesome kind of way.
Just in case its not clear, I think the movie is great.
It was not “chosen”, it just grew into a phenonmenon. I believe you will find that RHPS was the first midnight movie.
I just have to take issue with the factual inaccuracy of that statement. Repo! The Genetic Opera - Wikipedia
As you can see there, Repo actually has more than your average number of songs for a musical. I understand if you don’t like it, just trying to make sure your distaste doesn’t color your recollection of the facts.
Also, I can’t help but wonder why Repo is always brought up alongside RHPS. I mean I love them both but they are absolutely nothing alike whatsoever.
Just plain good. Great songs, wonderful performances, hilarious over-the-top dialogue and a bucketload of crazy. What’s not to love? Next you’ll be telling me you don’t like Clue.
I find RHPS to be just above ‘meh’. Meh-plus. It’s amusing enough that I won’t change the channel out of boredom, but I’d rather watch Law and Order reruns. So my answer to the question is ‘neither’.
Yeah, I can’t figure why some people want to tear down* Repo!* to build up Rocky Horror. It’s a completely unfair comparison, as Repo! has decades to go before it can prove its staying power the way RHPS has. I love both movies, I’ve gone to midnight showings of RHPS and got to see Repo! during its brief theatrical run, and I think both are fantastic.
I disagree slightly with you when you say they’re nothing alike whatsoever – Repo! wouldn’t even exist without RHPS. I’ve heard a lot of people claiming Repo! is Rocky Horror-meets-Sweeney Todd, but I think it’s more Rocky Horror-meets-Blade Runner. But they are very different films, and by no means does Repo! tread on RHPS’s toes – the former is a cybergoth revenge opera set in a post-apocalyptic future, while the latter is a campy, sexual tribute to old B-horror movies and classic cinema.
Also, jackdavinci, you have clearly never seen Repo! The Genetic Opera. The movie is NOTHING BUT songs – it’s an opera in the classic sense, as the entire story is told through songs. There’s maybe three lines of spoken dialogue in the entire movie.
“Songs” perhaps. Songs, no. Yes, it has plenty of separable bits of dialogue set to music with perhaps some minimal amount of rhyming. There are zero. Yes, zero. Not even one. That is, there are no songs, whatsoever, which go beyond being minimal effort dialogue set to music to become actual Songs, capital S, which one would ever hear on a radio by itself, or want to have on one’s ipod playlist.
Not for lack of 1) trying - I applaud the efforts of the creators, but they fail entirely 2) fanwanking/making excuses, etc. I have friends who were really into REPO, and replaced Rocky at our local venue, and, I was really excited, and prone to make any excuse possible. But. No. Not musical. Not even interesting. Setting to music / proclivity to be nice to friends in production / interesting premise / having Anthony Stewart Head all made me overly prone to giving a positive review. But no, it failed on every single merit.
Well, in my locality, it’s promoted as and considered the successor to, RHPS. In my opinion, it happens to fail, hugely, in that regard, and Buffy OMWF is a much much more worthy successor except for lack of corporate cooperation. But I understand where the comparisons come from. It’s the most notable recent sci-fi musical with a taboo subject.
It’s not that it doesn’t have enough exposure to build up a camp audience. It’s that it doesn’t have actual songs. It just has sing-song dialogue set to music. There’s no actual songs.
Oh I assure you I have seen it. And even been anticipating my viewing. But I barely managed to stay in my seat and/or stay awake. Yeah, they play music during some of the dialogue. But there’s no actual songs. If you don’t know the difference then…
I also wouldn’t say that Repo doesn’t have songs, but it sure as hell doesn’t have any good ones, and at least one of them (Seventeen) is the worst thing ever. And the “all songs, all the time” concept of Repo does mean that songs blend together too much for it to be properly called a musical (lots of it is just dialogue set to music) while at the same time it doesn’t have the coherence of an opera.
As for Repo and RHPS being completely different: you could make a case for that. But everyone I know mentions Repo in the same breath as RHPS (if they mention it at all: even after just a year or two it’s clear Repo has no staying power), as did, IIRC, most reviews I’ve read about the film, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
I thought it was entertaining to watch in a theater with fans interacting with the events, but when I tried viewing it at home, I found it almost unwatchable.