A cult favorite among fans of midnight movies since its debut in 1975, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is an absurd mess with pansexual interests, goofy film references, wall-to-wall kitsch and odd performances. Featuring several of today's more well known actors, but headlined by Susan Sarandon, Tim Curry and Barry Bostwick, the film is equal parts awful and brilliant in the way it blends the musical genre with the demands of a Frankenstein creation myth-cum-sci-fi freak show.

Marketed in comparison to Steven Spielberg's Jaws just then turning on audiences to platform release patterns and thrilling movie technique, Jim Sharman's musical was called, "A Different Set Of Jaws." Its spectators were asked to, "Give yourself over to absolute pleasure," and, in so doing, they were launched into a parallel world with Nixon references and wooden character types filled with unusual appetites.

Brad Majors (Bostwick) and Janet Weiss (Sarandon) attend a wedding in Denton, Ohio after which he proposes marriage and she accepts. Driving away they get lost in a rainstorm when their car stalls in the middle of nowhere. After seeing a group of motorcyclists heading towards a spooky castle, they approach the monolith to request help and therein find the assorted servants and guests of Doctor Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry). Included in this bevy of eccentrics is Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien), a hunchback manservant, Magenta (Patricia Quinn) and Columbia (Nell Campbell), a pair of maids, and the good Doctor's latest creation, Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood), a beefcake pin-up made flesh and blood in a burst of storming electricity.

Over the course of their evening trapped in the castle, Brad and Janet witness the murder of Eddie (Meat Loaf), Magenta's one-time lover, find themselves seduced by their transvestite host and otherwise feel confused by the play of rock music and terror that is their campy circumstance. When Frank-N-Furter's rival Dr. Everett V. Scott (Jonathan Adams) shows up to investigate the disappearance of his nephew Eddie, the various household tensions come to a head.

Riff Raff and Magenta are revealed as emissaries of the planet Transsexual masquerading as Frank-N-Furter's servants to help put on the annual convention of visitors from their home world. Rocky Horror ends up choosing Janet as his preferred lover over Frank-N-Furter's frightening advances, thereby incensing his maker, and Dr. Scott becomes caught in the web of his rival's plans to do no good.

Told through bookends of an omniscient narration provided by an all-knowing Criminologist (Charles Gray), the story finally resolves as Riff Raff and Magenta take over the castle. Frank-N-Furter views their mutiny with utter dismay and is unable to forgive their insolence or accept the rebalance of power. In the ensuing struggle they kill him as Brad, Janet, Magenta and Rocky escape beneath the blast-off of the castle returning to the galaxy Transylvania, thus ending the nightmare in the dust of unsettled adventures.

Having been written as stage play under the same title by co-star Richard O'Brien, the resulting film, partially re-written by Sharman, enlists a bevy of catchy songs, each of them littered with movie references. From the first track, "Science Fiction Double Feature", with pointers to The Day the Earth Stood Still, Flash Gordon, The Invisible Man, King Kong, It Came from Outer Space, Doctor X, Forbidden Planet, Tarantula, The Day of the Triffids, Night of the Demons and When Worlds Collide, through the well-known "Time Warp", "Sweet Transvestite", "I Can Make You a Man", Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me", "Don't Dream It" and "I'm Going Home", The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a scattershot collection of pop-cultural refuse. At once a liberating, kinetic and crazy fantasy of changing sexual identities, unnerving space invaders, simplistic criminal intrigues and numerous musical breaks, it's also a cult favorite existing with a parallel life off to one side of the foundational film.

To speak ill of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in light of this cultish and devoted fan base would be to miss the point. To over-praise its basic value as movie entertainment, however, would be to buy into the global phenomenon without sufficient regard for its place on the big screen. Either attitude limits a very complete critical reaction, one in favor of high art standards, the other in favor of the midnight movies crowd of costume-wearing, scene-re-enacting fans who vilify and celebrate Frank-N-Furter's assortment of collaborators and enemies with religious conviction.

Judging the film as a commercial phenomenon is also rife with complexity and plenty of space for reconsideration. Because it's earned a conservatively reported domestic rental of some $49 million on a considerably smaller investment, it's a success story in a plutocratic industry of ticketing feasts or else chirruping crickets and bankrupted limited liability corporations. Moreover, the film's box office record fails to indicate its international successes or the revenues generated from licensing related products, the sales of soundtrack albums or the earnings potential of the Broadway stage production recently mounted to much praise and celebrity participation.

Trying to bottom line Sharman's film, just like any application of traditional film criticism to its length, ends up forgetting its purpose as a movie spoof and celebration of marginalia so central to its storyline and big production numbers. In placing emphasis on outsider influences like transvestism, transsexual identity and the everywhere crumbling condition of parochial heterosexual marriage, the movie is protest art celebrating border expressions, repressed desires and freedom of expression at the expense of mainstream controls and beliefs.

Likewise the film's ready reliance on horror and science fiction movie motifs, situations and conventions like dark nights, scary houses, mad scientists, space travel, ray guns and the creation of life from raw materials more than adequately ridicules those conventions while also warmly vouching for the continued appeal of such signposts to our sense of pop cultural meaning. So too do the musical numbers connect with the twin traditions of musical and dance numbers that have had a long relationship with the cinema. Updating those traditions to include the grinding pulse of rock music's hard downbeats, guitar riffs and anger, the film meets the youth audience of 1975 with a potent blend of laughs, song and pastiche that has continued to reach new fans in circumstances as varied as the countries of the world.

Plus there's something to be said about glimpsing Sarandon, Curry and Bostwick long before each of them achieved more noteworthy, and critically well-regarded, success in later films and TV. Not without charms on that basis alone, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not for everyone, nor should it be when realizing all the leaps of good taste, story-telling technique and common sense required of its silly excesses. More telling than a dismissal, more significant than a critic's raised thumb, the film should be remembered as one of the best-loved pictures of all time, if not just from 1975 that also saw the release of the Oscar winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.