If The Room is not the worst film of all time, it has to at least be a contender for worst film of the decade. The acting is on a totally different level to what would normally be considered 'bad', there are numerous times when the story makes no sense and the overall look of the film makes you think they were working with a budget that is similar to what a high school student would be spending on a final film assignment (despite having an actual budget of about $7 million).
So, why does this movie deserve a recommendation? Well, it sure is pretty darn entertaining. Tommy Wiseau (Writer, Director, Actor) has got to be the most bizarre filmmaker and the greatest accidental genius since Edward D Wood Jr.
First of all, take a look at his appearance in the promotional poster. This guy right here, with his long frizzy hair and half vacant look on his face (not to mention those freaky eyes) is supposed to be the leading man. He doesn't quite look like your typical movie star. Furthermore, when you watch one of the films many overlong gratuitous sex scenes, you will see a lot more of him then what you will want to. To be fair, the guy clearly works out and is in pretty good shape, but his skin seems to remind me of the inside leather of a worn out baseball glove. Of course, there are a few successful performers that have gotten by without traditional good looks. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, Mickey Rourke, these are all actors who have shown that they can still star in successful movies without being the perfect looking leading man.
No such luck with Wiseau. In fact, if he had not written and directed this film, not only would he not be starring in a feature film, but it would be difficult to believe that anyone would even let Tommy Wiseau onto a film set as a pizza delivery boy. He speaks with a very unusual unidentifiable European accent that makes all of his already horrendous dialogue even more hilarious in a Schwarzenegger kind of way. One of his many comically unusual habits is his insistence on greeting absolutely every character that crosses his path by acknowledging their name (oh hi Mark, oh hi Denny, oh hi Doggie). He also has dialogue that makes you think twice about what you just heard. This includes randomly changing the topic of conversation into asking his friend how his sex life is going, talking to himself about how he didn't hit his fiancé and using an imitation of a chicken as an insult in an argument.
While Tommy Wiseau stands out as the biggest weirdo to watch on screen, he is surrounded by other people that you also won't be seeing performing Hamlet anytime soon. Greg Sestero, who plays Mark, speaks his lines very subdued as if they're coming straight off the page. Julliette Danielle as Lisa is constantly being referred to as "soooo beautiful!", but the audience I sat with didn't seem to think so from the way that they reacted to her sex scenes. The actress who plays Lisa's mother has one of the best lines in the film when she tells her daughter "The doctor called this morning, it's definitely breast cancer" only to never speak of this cancer again for the rest of the movie. That's ok though, because based on her line delivery, she didn't seem too bothered by a little thing like breast cancer when she mentioned it anyway.
Seeing this film with a crowd in the theatre is totally essential. While it has become a hit midnight movie in a few different countries, it seems that one of the things that has helped the film to take off in the US is that Tommy Wiseau often attends these screenings himself and will even have a Q & A with the audience. While seeing that would be too cool for me to comprehend, at the Nova Cinema in Melbourne Australia I had to settle for just a short film clip introduction by Greg Sestero (Mark) before the movie began.
The audience at my screening was also given a short pamphlet that was called "A Viewers Guide to The Room". This guide was intended to instruct the audience what they are supposed to yell at the screen and when. This guide can be seen below. Some of my favorite things to do were throwing spoons at the screen(also supplied by the theatre), shouting "Alcatraz!" at the artistic bar shots and screaming "go!" at the unnecessary panning over the Golden Gate Bridge.
What really makes this a great-bad-film is its ability to be consistently hilarious from start to finish. Often a bad film can become funny when its run time is edited down into a youtube video that runs for only a couple of minutes. The Wicker Man remake being a recent example of this. When watched in these short versions, they are great, however, what rests between these standout scenes is often tedious filler. It's still bad, but not bad enough to be watchable. The Room, on the other hand, remains so terrible in every scene, every performance and every story twist that it really is a glorious mess to watch and is an extremely fun time out at the movies.
(A Viewers Guide to The Room, Supplied by Nova Cinema in Melbourne.
Click the above image for a closer look).
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