Sideswipe

10.03.04
Anna Samways

Jaq Tweedie explains what erecting a statue of the movie character Riff Raff on the former site of the Embassy cinema in Hamilton is all about. She writes: It's about B-movies. It's about the concept of cult and pop culture. The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a movie about B-movies. When Richard O'Brien sang, "I wanna go, to the late-night double feature picture show", every kid in New Zealand knew he was a Kiwi, and he was singing about the cinema in small-town New Zealand. That's why we turned up at the cinemas, in the middle of the night, every weekend, for 17 years. So we watched Rocky Horror, and we took ownership of O'Brien, and some of us dared to try to make movies for ourselves; just little crappy ones, ones that took two years of Sundays with our friends helping. We had buckets of fake blood and spew and zombie and alien masks that we baked in our Mum's oven. B-movies. No pretensions. And the little crappy movies grew and grew until they were quite good, and then they grew into trilogies that won so many Oscars that we needed a separate plane to fly them home ... to NZ.