STRANGE JOURNEY Is a Sweet If Insubstantial Time Warp Through Rocky Horror History 

There’s really no way to overstate the mark that The Rocky Horror Picture Show, now fifty years old, has made on the psyches of generations of queer people. I personally first saw the film alone in my room when I was thirteen, finally losing my shadowcast virginity a few years later. Since then, I’ve probably seen it a few dozen times; rookie numbers at best for regular Rocky fans. Still, watching first time director Linus O’Brien’s sweet, easygoing, light-on-substance documentary, I couldn’t resist tossing most of the callbacks at the screen whenever clips from this indelible cult classic played. It’s a subject you can’t help but love, treated with affection by the man whose father (multidisciplinary artist, actor and Rocky writer Richard O’Brien) brought the phenomenon into the world. 

That collective love is the picture’s foundation, carrying the material zippily through its runtime, but it’s also the film’s ceiling. While it’s an enjoyable watch and a good primer for fledgeling fans, Rocky Horror cultists are unlikely to learn a whole lot of new information from Strange Journey, even about Richard O’Brien himself, whose connection to the filmmaker is the crux of the documentary’s emotional arc. While the father-son dynamic steering the production is touching, it seems to have left both O’Briens content to skim the surface rather than fully dive into touchier territory around some questions of gender, sexuality, and the politics of visibility that are suggested. Still, it’s a pleasant tribute to this beloved movie, the high watermark of cult cinema and the longest-running theatrical film in the medium’s history. 

Strange Journey is, in essence, a chronological look at the process of bringing Rocky Horror to life made animate through the vigor of the creatives responsible for it. We follow the elder O’Brien down memory lane from New Zealand to London where he got his start in theater in 1967— the year the “black and white” city “went technicolor.” The archival materials from this period are plentiful and vivid, giving taste and texture to the underground roots of a film so totemic in its 50s B-movie pastiche that its influences from its more immediate milieu–– from the films of Derek Jarman and Andy Warhol to the grungy greenrooms and glam rock ‘n’ roll parties of the ‘70s where Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, and David Bowie all campaigned to play Dr. Frank-N-Furter–– sometimes go unnoticed. 

Commendable too is the impressive lineup O’Brien the younger has gathered from the cast(s) and crew of the film and its multiple original stage runs, who share their own recollections of the theatrical piece’s modest origins in a 60-seat fringe house to packed opening nights with Cher and Jack Nicholson in attendance. It’s wonderful to see Tim Curry, now seventy-nine, reflect with pleasure and cogency on crafting Frank (he contemplated a German accent for this iconic androgyne vixen before realizing “he should sound like the Queen”) with an emphasis on powerplay over all else. Jim Sharman too, the director of both the show and the film, describes lowering the ramp for Curry’s entrance so his stilettos would fall at eye level to hit the audience with a “genuine fear of physical damage.” Susan Sarandon for her part recalls arriving on set for the film without a place to stay, essentially couch surfing armed only with her birth control pills and a toothbrush. The anecdotes are plentiful and lively, keeping the broader proceedings playful and engaging even as the story retreads familiar beats–– admittedly a challenge for any documentary of this nature, though more creative structures like the one deployed by Alexandre O. Phillipe’s essayistic Chain Reactions (out this year) can elegantly belie. 

That’s clearly not the goal here, though. Strange Journey wears its heart on its sleeve as it relates earnest messages of love and acceptance, community and found family, all of which are more than earned and incredibly well taken in this context. After the film becomes a midnight classic, though, the documentary wraps up surprisingly quickly. While current politics are touched on (most directly by the perennially wonderful Curry calling conservatives’ use of gender “as a political football” a form of “global idiocy”), these dynamics are more of a button than anything else, and headlines citing drag bans in small towns where the film plays are never fleshed out. Questions of O’Brien’s own journey to self-acceptance are kept similarly at a distance even as one of his friends briefly mentions his wife’s negative reaction to his coming out as gender nonconforming. This makes the community spirit and potent ideas of Rocky Horror, which the subjects all correctly describe as political, feel a little warmer and fuzzier than they necessarily should be. “The movie, like these people” says an announcer in an archival clip of Rocky fans in costume, “wants to shock you.” Strange Journey most certainly does not, delivering a sweet-tempered, affable cinematic experience that’s worth catching for fans of the film on its own terms. Still, while it never falls, in 2025 that Sword of Damocles is certainly felt.