Brad and Janet, seated in the audience, are chosen to participate in the game show Marriage Maze by the kooky, supposedly blind host, Bert Schnick.

While on the Marriage Maze, Brad is deemed "an emotional cripple," and is forcibly sent to Dentonvale, a mental hospital run by siblings Cosmo and Nation McKinley and the subject of the synonymously named reality show, for "treatment."

Janet's parents, Emily and Harry Weiss, also become enamored with fame and television, appearing first on Marriage Maze, answering questions about Brad's alleged mental instability, and later, as their "prize" for answering questions about Brad correctly, on Happy Homes, a reality TV show that follows people on a television set of an idealized suburban home.

The trio break onto the set of Farley's latest show, Faith Factory, during its debut just as Janet, who is heavily drugged, is about to be crowned "Miss Mental Health."

Everyone except the four prisoners and the kids in the local band, Oscar Drill and the Bits, willingly and enthusiastically accept straitjackets and commit themselves to Dentonvale in the name of "mental health."

Following the unexpected and overwhelming success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the midnight circuit, Richard O'Brien approached producer Michael White with the idea of filming a sequel.

Director Jim Sharman was resistant to revisit the material and Tim Curry had no desire to reprise the role of Frank,[11] but O'Brien had put some work into the songs, so he decided to retain them and simply revise the story.

Several of the film’s original Transylvanians appeared in the movie; Ishaq Bux,[17] Annabel Leventon, Gaye Brown, and Lindsay Ingram in the DTV audience,[18] while Imogen Claire, Rufus Collins, and Pierre Bedenes were given the slightly-larger parts of the Wardrobe Mistress and Neely’s camera crew, Respectively.

Founder and long-time president of Rocky Horror fan club, Sal Piro, also has a silent cameo appearance as the man using the payphone during the opening sequence.

[20] Auditions were held at The Roxy theater to find a suitable replacement, and Jessica Harper, previously of Brian De Palma's cult musical Phantom of the Paradise, impressed the filmmakers with her singing skills.

[23] The elaborate opening shot begins on Farley in the overhead video booth, and the camera slowly does a 360° pan around the room as the crew prepares for the show and Brad and Janet enter the studio.

[16] In spite of pre-release hype (including a promotional TV special called The Rocky Horror Treatment),[24] the film was both a critical and commercial failure when it was released only as a midnight movie on Halloween 1981.

In one of his television reviews, Roger Ebert said that he felt Rocky Horror fans would reject a movie that was specifically targeted at them, remarking that "cult film audiences want to feel that they have seen the genius of something that everybody else hates.

")[6] Gradually, however, Shock Treatment did build up a cult following all its own and, as Ebert wrote, many contemporary reviewers remark that it was initially condemned in part because it was too ahead of its time, being a prescient satire of reality television.

[34] Shock Treatment was first released on DVD in the UK on May 22nd, 2006, as part of The Rocky Horror Picture Show 30th Anniversary Collector's Edition[35] The disc only included a theatrical trailer in terms of special features.

All DVD releases include a brief sound dropout before the last chorus of Denton U.S.A., and a chunk of the end credit Overture has been lopped off to prematurely fade into the single version of Shock Treatment.

[41] In 2017, the British label Arrow Video released the film on Blu-ray in the UK which featured a new commentary with Quinn and Little Nell, as well as "The Rocky Horror Treatment".

For nearly a decade beginning in the mid 2000s, director Benji Sperring, a fan of the film, attempted to convince Richard O'Brien to give him the rights to produce a stage adaptation of Shock Treatment.

[43] On this proviso, the show wound up at the King's Head Theatre in Islington, London, where artistic director Adam Spreadbury-Maher made the suggestion that Tom Crowley adapt the script.

O'Brien, co-composer Richard Hartley and Sperring agreed on the story's direction prior to scripting,[45] and they consulted primarily through email during the rest of the production process.