The Room  (2003)

I'm admittedly way late to the party on this one. A few of my friends had told me it was one of those movies I needed to watch just to experience, but I always had something else jump to the top of my viewing list, and this kept falling aside. I finally was determined to sit down and watch "the Citizen Kane of bad movies", and I'm not entirely sure what I just saw.

Johnny is a reasonably successful banker living in San Francisco with his fiance Lisa. We're introduced to Johnny with an act of romance, bringing flowers home to his betrothed. After a quick introduction of a creepy supporting character, we get our first uncomfortable sex scene! Tommy Wiseau, who plays Johnny, clearly works out but his body is somehow distortedly muscular. His skin looks like it doesn't quite fit around the musculature, resulting in a look of plastic combined with leather. He also must know about some secret sex stuff that I'm unaware of, because their bodies never really line up, resulting in Johnny humping Lisa's pelvic bone region. The coitus mercifully ends, but don't worry, after a few more minutes of plot advancement, they jump right back into bed. I legit thought I had been tricked into watching a soft-core porn for the first fifteen minutes or so (don't you have neighbors who use your house as a love pad and another neighbor who "likes to watch"?).

Despite Johnny's romantic gestures and devotion to Lisa, she decides she's bored with him and tries to seduce Mark, Johnny's best friend. Lisa's mother tries to convince her that Johnny is a wonderful guy, but Lisa won't hear it. Lisa's rebellious attitude towards her mother might also be because mom insists that Lisa is incapable of living without the help of a man. Lisa treats Johnny like garbage with seemingly no motivation, things explode at a party, and Johnny falls off the deep end. Somewhere in the middle there's a drug deal gone bad, a dime-store psychiatrist, a lot of standing up and sitting down mid-conversation, weird green-screen shots, and a game of "football" that looks like it was played by someone who learned what football was ten seconds before "action!" was yelled out.

This movie fails on literally every level. Script, acting, directing, cinematography, sound, editing...nothing works. It's almost impressive that Wiseau, as star/writer/director/producer, managed to bungle every aspect of movie-making, not even being able to luck into making at least one thing work. The storyline at its most basic is workable: a love triangle between best friends. As soon as Wiseau went beyond those six words, everything went to hell.

There's a longstanding debate about acting versus the script. Can a script be so bad that the best actor in the world can't save it? Or can a script be so amazing that even a terrible actor can make it work? I took a few acting classes in high school and college and I'm certain that every person in those classes, even at 15 to 20 years old, could act circles around this cast. I've seen plenty of indie movies with bad scripts and bad acting, but this is just a whole new level. Wiseau has tried to keep an air of mystery about his childhood, but clearly English is not his first language. He has an accent that I genuinely cannot place, maybe a bit of Dutch plus Cajun plus generic speech impediment? He swallows syllables, his tone bounces like a manic depressive, and the craziest thing is the final cut of the movie shows some poorly edited overdubs, meaning he originally spoke even worse, and this gibberish was the best he could do.

I know this is a non sequitur, but Wiseau looks like a vampire from a 1980s European horror movie. He looks like Glenn Danzig and Ric Flair circa 1998 had a baby. He looks like a henchman who dies in the second act of "Die Hard 9".

Take something like "Flash Gordon", a "bad" movie that I love. The script is goofy, the acting is hammy, but it manages to work because it's meant to be campy. "The Room" doesn't work because, at least to my eyes, everyone involved played it totally seriously. There was no irony, no winking, no sense that anyone thought anything other than "this movie is gonna be awesome you guys!"

The fact that everyone played this so straight is what really makes me give it a terrible score. If it was done like "Flash Gordon" or done as a spoof or done with a smirk, I could at least give it credit as a "so bad it's good" example...but it's just plain bad.

 

 

On the [Celluloid Hero] scale, "The Room" gets a 1 out of 10.

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