radmanart The filmmakers intended to shoot on location in Denton, Texas, but production screeched to a halt in 1980 when the Screen Actors Guild went on strike.Just knowing this movie is made after the town of Denton Texas makes this worth while. Denton, Denton, Texas is the next county over from my county;, Collin County. When we first moved here to McKinney in 1994 we traveled allot around Texas and we went to Denton every once and a while. It had a strange attraction to it, and the people seamed overly friendly and put offish at the same time. Weird in other words, but in a good way.My wife was thinking about going to college there back in 1994. We hung out there for a while and checked out the college. It seemed to invite you to like Denton at the same time push you away. I can not believe how much Shock Treatment reminds me of the movie True Stories. I wonder if some of the same people were involved in the making of both movies? I wonder if True Stories was modeled after Shock Treatment? True Stories is 100 times a better finer quality movie though. The sound quality in True Stories is the best I have ever heard in a great rock and roll based movie.

plutoburns The spiritual successor to Rocky Horror stands as a far more interesting if less mimetic musical romp of wackiness. The story of a the Town of Denton, that takes so much pride in their local TV program that the audience will LITERALLY sleep in the stands between broadcast days. And over the course of this movie, a marriage will be broken, stars will be made and a national course of "Mental Health" will be prescribed.To sum up this movie is nigh impossible as it features an evil twin brother, incestuous doctors and biting social commentary, all fired fast and loose at the viewer. Rocky Horror didn't make much sense either, but Rocky was ultimately pointless nonsense meant to offend the sense abilities. Shock Treatment actually has a point to it all, but that point is mostly that reality television and fame are corrupting influences of evil; an admirable sentiment to hold considering that this movie predates reality TV by about a decade. All the packed in details, looping plot lines and motivations make this a much harder movie to comprehend than rocky and also harder to simply loose yourself in the surreal-ness of it all. But it definitely stands a bizarre movie worth seeing and easily riff able if you've had a few brewskis.The music is a mixed bag. Stand out tracks of Dear Blender and Shock Treatment constantly delight and there are some trippy introspection songs as well. But others just fall flat, either through instrumentation or staging.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU If you want to know what it is pure television you have to watch that sequel of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was done for television and constantly remindS you of the fact.The whole action takes place in the Denton TV studio. It is the story of a television show that changes sponsors. The new sponsor has to diabolize the older sponsor and to push forward a new icon for the new sponsor that creates at first a link with the older one. Hence they diabolize the older sponsor as some kind of emotional misfit and use his wife as the new icon. They will even reveal in the end that the new sponsor is in fact the twin brother of the older one. And there we have a basic simple primitive if not even simplistic theme that goes back to the oldest layers of prehistory, the conflict between two brothers, what's more twin brothers. Better than Abel and Cain. And this wife of the older sponsor will bring sight to the blind anchor man of the show. Isn't that divine and angelic and beautiful? Then it uses language as some kind of mesmerizing fascinating hypnotizing whip to make you get in line with the game. The rhyming patterns are so simple that they seem to be like the drums of some voodoo dance with a lot of Hollywood sauce on top and a simplistic comic flavour underneath. You are the pronged cattle taken up and tied up in that caravan, carnival, canned mental emptiness. And the main catch letter to your ears and eyes is F. F mind you like in the most famous four letter word in English, and yet it is five Fs in one motto. Farley Flavors' Fabulous Fast Foods that becomes in the mouth of some TV announcer: "First and Foremost, Farley Flavors' Fabulous Fast Foods Feed and Fortify Families For a Fabulous Future." From five to thirteen, from the devil to the witch, from the pentacle to the worst omen possible on earth. Be repetitive and you will always reach the bottom of hell and the dire straits or purgatory. But don't expect to find heaven in commercial repetitiveness.But the point is that this show, this film, this TV film, this film about TV and this film at the local TV station does not in the least try to make you think. It is here only to whirl you around into a maelstrom out of which you cannot escape. And don't believe there are good ones and bad ones. There are only old ones and new ones and new ones are neither better nor worse than old ones. They have only one aim which is to make you be a robotic un-thinker, a mechanized non-thinker, a motorized anti-thinker.That's the kind of rapport TV wants to establish with its audience: all-sensorial, hypnotic, non-mental acceptance of the show as good or the same all-sensorial, hypnotic, non-mental rejection of the show as bad. You like or don't like but you sure don't have to think about it. It is all at the level of your kinetic and kinesthetic, kinesiological primary response at the essentially physiological level of your being, what they justly call the "id" in the show, with Freud's picture somewhere lost in that mess.The only link with the Rocky Horror Picture Show is in fact in the flimsy vision of Grant Wood's painting known as American Gothic. But that is a cliché, nothing else, not even a wink.And be sure this TV film will not take any side between the losers of old and the winners of today. They will eventually all go their own ways but with the same convertible and one girl will be replaced by another one in the "First and Foremost, Farley Flavors' Fabulous Fast Foods Feed and Fortify families For a Fabulous Future" advertising venture, and the new one will even be better since she is a gorgeous, sumptuous, splendiferous, glorious and definitely opulent blonde. Television does not require the audience to think but only to feel good and relaxed.Some may say it is a pastiche of a TV show or even of a TV comic thriller. But it is such a good pastiche that we do believe it is the real stuff. It is a perfect imitation of a TV show and as such it is a perfect pastiche, but that does not give it any mental reflective distance. It is meant to carry your adhesion or your rejection but not to make you think in any way. You like or you dislike but to agree or disagree is not even a question.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

metalrox_2000 It's hard to follow a piece of genius like the Rocky Horror Picutre Show. Richard O'Brien tries, and nearly succeeds, if he didn't give into being cheesy at times. Some regulars return in different roles, such as O'Brien, Patrica Quinn, "Little" Nell Campbell, and Charles Gray. However, the tongue in cheek humor and craziness of Rocky Horror, gives way to a film that tries to be bizarre for bizarre sake.Cliff DeYoung is underused is a duel role, and Jessica Harper seems even more prudish and isn't as attractive as Susan Surrandon was in Rocky Horror. Not that Harper isn't pretty, just that she frighteningly has too close to a unibrow for my taste.The lines are over the top in delivery too many times, and it detracts from the film. The plot really doesn't matter, and nor should it. The film does have some decent songs,a few of which would have fit in nicely in Rocky Horror. But those sets with the Bright Red and Hot Pink just hurt the eyes, and I pity those who saw this in the theater or watch it in high def, you're going to hurt your eyes.The plus for me is Little Nell as the seductive Nurse Ansalong. As weird as she was in Rocky Horror, she's simply sexy as the nurse who just seems to be the prototype of any erotic fantasy involving a nurse. She looks a lot different then she did in Rocky, with flowing red hair, a delightfully short skirt, which gives way to many pantie shots of her.The film could have used more of an interjection of her, and less of Jessica Harper singing. O'Brien and Quinn seemed that they should have had more screen time as well.That being said, the film is enjoyable in some parts, unwatchable in others (espcially those in the terrible rooms mentioned above)and delivers some decent songs. Good for collectors of O'Brien's work, but those expecting a film on par with Rocky Horror, you'll be disappointed.