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DIRECTED BY: Linus O’Brien
FEATURING: Jack Black, Susan Sarandon, Tim Curry, Richard O’Brien, Peter Hinwood, Patricia Quinn, Barry Bostwick
PLOT: Most of the cast and crew of The Rocky Horror Picture Show gather to re-tell their experiences making the landmark cult classic that became the ultimate midnight movie.
COMMENTS: It isn’t enough just to call The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) a “cult movie,” because it is the first movie to attract a cult at all. As fan after fan raves, it’s not just a movie, it’s an event, a lifestyle, an anthem uniting all us rainbow freaks into the collection of beautiful cosmic blueberries we are. For the 50th anniversary of this phenomenon, Strange Journey (2025) reunites most of the major cast and production team to tell how this movie came to be.
The documentary is everything you’d expect. The producers spared no effort in tracking down everybody for a chat. Although sadly missing rock legend Meatloaf (RIP 2022), we still get sit-down interviews with Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Bary Bostwick, Patricia Quinn, and even the rarely-appearing Peter Hinwood. Most prominently, we get Rocky creator and Riff-Raff himself, Richard O’Brien, giving us the complete story of how the story came to be: from its inception as a stage play to creation of the film, its initial flop release, and its subsequent discovery as a cult hit. We even get O’Brien on acoustic guitar singing the hits from the show as he originally composed them.
The documentary is well-produced, with a nice flow alternating interviews and voice-overs with montages of photos and theater review clippings. The fandom gets its say as well, including veteran “shadow cast” performers speaking about how the cult around Rocky allowed them to live out their dreams as their out-of-the-closet selves. Jack Black provides cultural commentary. I don’t even question Jack Black appearing in anything anymore; he’s a free-range media personality who’s attracted to the smell of any camera.
Your humble author was a tad young to catch The Rocky Horror Picture Show when it first came out, but I still heard about it. Over the years, a steady trickle of friends and acquaintances turned up saying they’d caught the show at some midnight campus event. I ended up with a cassette tape of the soundtrack before I ever saw the movie. As soon as I saw it, I got it immediately. The 1970s were a decade of hard-fought social issues, and a time when Americans were maddeningly obsessed with everybody else’s peepees and what they were doing with them. Rocky hit at the exact crest of a wave of social change, throwing off the persecution of alternate lifestyles and expression and wrapping sexual rebellion up in a tribute to rock ‘n’ roll and vintage horror. It was destined to be a hit, because this movie urgently needed to be made at that time.
Naturally, any Rocky fan worth their feather boa needs to run right out and see this doc. So should cultural historians, and for that matter, rock music fans, because Rocky is the singularity around which all things cool revolve.
Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror can now be rented on Plex, Apple TV, or Google Play, and a Blu-ray release drops on July 7, 2026.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: