IN HER REVIEW of the (underseen and now practically lost through official channels1) Pass the Ammo, Pauline Kael wrote, “There has never been enough of Tim Curry onscreen.”
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Kael → lose → Curry
I can barely remember the film—it was not, sadly, a basic cable classic and has never even gotten a DVD release—but I do remember Tim Curry’s wolfish grin.
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I → remember → grin
That sly, lupine quality shone through in virtually all of his roles, most famously in the flamboyant sweet transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania, Dr. Frank-N-Furter.
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quality → shine → Transexual
Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is the greatest midnight movie of all time, the definitional cult classic, and it is that for . . . well, many reasons, I guess, but mostly because Tim Curry plays the deranged alien doctor with a demented glee that made it look fun to be a freak.
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it → guess → glee
The movie was a siren song for outcasts and he was the lead vocalist, luring audience “virgins” to be defiled by regulars.
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he → lure → regulars
Longtime readers won’t be shocked to learn that this wasn’t, really, my scene, though I did attend a late-night Rocky Horror showing at the Landmark E Street Cinema (RIP) in Washington, D.C. many moons ago.
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I → learn → Washington
He leaned into it and, in that moment, became an icon.
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He → lean → moment
Personally, I preferred another role in which Curry was slathered with makeup to scare the normies: It, the television adaptation of Stephen King’s classic horror novel.
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Curry → prefer → novel
After its debut on ABC in 1990, It would play at fairly regular intervals on the USA and Sci-Fi/SyFy Networks, and if it was on, I was watching it.
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I → play → it
Again, this is a role that only really works because Curry commits so hard to the bit, because he revels so mightily in his work as a grease-painted maniac.
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he → work → maniac
There’s an exaggeration not only to that predatory grin—in all seriousness, how big was his mouth, what were the proportions here—but to every move, every motion.
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proportions → ’ → move
You never knew someone could spin one of those obnoxious noisemakers with malevolence until you saw Curry crank that thing like it was a meatgrinder.
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it → know → thing
The other Curry movie that became a fixture on cable TV is Clue (1985), where he holds the whole thing together.
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he → become → thing
At first he’s the straight man, the understated butler.
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he → ’ → ?
But as the evening wears on and bodies begin dropping, he shifts into high-manic gear, sprinting through the hallways, waving knives and candlesticks around, shouting “I’m not shouting,” etc.
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I → wear → knives
It’s an absurd movie in multiple senses, and an early hint at the decades of dreaded IP management that we in the audience would soon be subjected to, but it has attained the status of a classic for a reason.
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it → ’ → reason
Curry is one of those classically British actors who, like Michael Caine, understands you never turn down work and you take the work seriously, no matter the role.
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you → understand → work
And like Caine, Curry delivered one of the standout Muppet adaptations, Muppet Treasure Island, the sort of movie that has no business working and yet does because you never get the sense that Curry is treating the handheld creations as anything other than real people doing real things.
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Curry → deliver → things
This isn’t to say that he was unaware that what he was asked to do was occasionally absurd—fans of the video game Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 will never forget Curry practically losing it while delivering a climactic line in that game—but he respected the craft and we all responded to it.
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we → say → it
He also starred in a handful of genuinely great movies in relatively small parts (The Hunt for Red October, The Player), but it’s a relatively small part in a generally unloved film that I always think of when I think of Curry: Herkermer Homolka, in Frank Marshall’s Congo (1995).
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I → star → Congo
Pound for pound it has one of the greatest casts of “That Guy” actors ever assembled: Curry is joined by Ernie Hudson, Joe Don Baker, Bruce Campbell, John Hawkes, Taylor Nichols, Delroy Lindo, Joe Pantoliano, and . . . Jimmy Buffett?
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Curry → have → Hudson
Yup, that’s Jimmy Buffett.
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that → ’ → ?
And despite all that, despite this being a movie where vicious apes are cut in half by diamond-powered lasers (yeah that’s right), despite rivers of terrible CGI lava and murderous hippos and skydiving gorillas, the image that comes to mind when I think of Congo is Curry, cheeks full of sesame cake like a chipmunk who has stumbled onto a cache of acorns, being yelled at by Delroy Lindo to stop eating that sesame cake, then Curry pulling the cake from his mouth and getting dragged away.
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Curry → cut → mouth
But we’re lucky we got what we did.
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we → ’re → what
The Aporia
