The short version of the plot summary is this: In a postapacolyptic world, an Evil Rock God Magician named Mock (a fabulous mix between Bowie, Iggy and Mick) needs the voice of this chick singer named Angel (totally Deborah Harry) in a struggling rock group (very much Cheap Trick) to raise a demon from another dimension. (Yeah, I know. How fabulous.) Will Angel be wooed into this evil plot? Or will she stay with the band, and more importantly, with Omar the prick lead singer with whom she shares a love/hate relationship?

It ain't anime, but the illustration is very accomplished. The flick is full of sex drugs, and rock n' roll, but it's also very campy and acerbic. It is best appreciated by wasted gen-xers, not 14-year-old RPG geeks looking for maturbation material (unlike other films already mentioned). And OK, some of the songs sound like they were penned in the bathroom after a long gig and a lot of (or not enough) heroin, but that is just why they are utterly fabulous.

See it with many many people, preferably under the influence. You will thank me!!!

"I Am a Camera" was a straight stage play and then a film both based on the somewhat-brief section focusing on the aspiring femme-fatale Sally Bowles. Both were created in the early 50s, and both have faded away in the publics memory (the film, in any case, deservedly - a *tremendous bore*).

But the real cult classics are naturally the decadent, poignant 70s musical film and raucous 90s musical play by the name of Cabaret. The dark, lush film version is directed by the incomparable Bob Fosse, with phenomenal peformances by Joel Grey, Liza Minelli and Michael York. The film focuses again on the relationship between the Isherwood character and Sally, and the centerfuge is the Kit Kat Club, where the mysterious M.C. holds reign. The plot bears very little resemblence to the original stories, instead it takes a handful of characters and rearranges their relationships to bring out a new and equally fascinating narrative which fits the medium *perfectly*. The raunchy, subversive musical numbers, naturalisticly portrayed at the cabaret, are astonishingly evocative, delightful and disturbing. The exagerrated, if not fabricated (Isherwood was strictly for the boys) love triangle between Brian, Sally, and sugar-daddy Maxmillian, is possibly the most eroticly charged ever put on film. I would have to say that if you can even call it an adaptation, it's the< best adaptation of a novel in history.

The recent broadway production play is set in the infamous Studio 54, remodeled after a Berlin cabaret. It's a blast, but don't bother paying top dollar for the table seats and dining, the atmosphere is broken eating cafeteria-quality food from gladware and sipping crap champagne from plastic cups. Calling on elements and narratives from the book and the Fosse film, shedding the characters invented for the film and giving a more even treatment to sidelined characters, putting a kabosh on the love triangle but still focusing the invented romantic relationship between the Iserhwoodesque Clifford and Sally and is overseen by the cabaret's polylibidinous M.C. The musical numbers, both naturalistic and break-into-song fantastical, are a mix of old and new, successfull and not-so-much, the best borrowing liberally from Fosse-signature choreography. Salley Bowles has been portrayed by a string of actors from the impeccable Natasha Richardson to the inane Lea Thopson, and the M.C. has been played by a number of lovely men, including some Hedwig alumni, but no one has been able to compare to the definitive performance by Alan Cummings.

I will just come out and say it. I love Rocky Horror. I saw it for my 14th birthday party [yay hippy parents]. I'd discovered Bowie a year before so I already knew I was a freak, but Rocky Horror was...well, you know. Anyway I haven't gone to a screening in about 8 years (see post-geek paranoia, above), but fucked if I'm going back in the closet. Tim Curry was sex personafied, Richard O'Brian is a genius, and the whole shebang is the living end.

Oh yeah, the boring info shit. So in the 70s, Richard O'Brian (Riff in the film), wrote the Rocky Horror Show which mixed campy horror movies and campy queerness - two great tastes that taste great together. Rocky unsubs the subtext in Frankenstein by making Frankenstein the monster (i.e. evil bisexual transexual alien) , and the Monster an innocent (i.e. dumb reanimated blond himbo). Throw in the whitest of the white-bread sci-fi romantic leads, a half-assed plot for world domination and a full-assed plan for decadent deviant hedonism at all costs, and musical numbers ranging plastic soul to torch-songs, and you have one hell of a beautiful mess. The musical was a huge hit in London, and a tremendous flop in the dumb, reanimated, blond U.S. Richard somehow still got contracted to make a film with almost all the original London cast, plus virgins Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick. The movie was a disaster, everywhere, until