#84 The Room (Wes)

Oh hai reader! It’s that time again where we have another film that I’d never heard of before we started this list. As our viewing of this movie approached and we desperately tried to get a copy of it, we discovered that it’s actually shown quite often at The Prince Charles Cinema in London, billed as “the best worst movie ever made”. There’s actually a documentary about Troll 2 with the name of Best Worst Movie, so that’s a pretty big statement to make. So does The Room live up to this claim?

Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is a banker who lives with his finacee Lisa (Juliette Danielle). Lisa is unsatisfied with their relationship though and is secretly having an affair with Tommy’s best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). What follows is a story about Johnny’s idyllic life slowly crumbling around him as his relationship falls apart.

This movie is a master class in how not to make a movie. Tommy Wiseau is either an unequivocal genius, or the most inept man to grace Hollywood since Ed Wood. Not only does he star in this movie, but he also directed, produced and wrote it too. So really everything that’s terrible in this movie is down to him. Since this movie has gained notoriety, Wiseau has apparently claimed that it’s supposed to be a dark comedy, but it’s clear to anyone watching this, that Wiseau took this movie very seriously.

As a film about human interaction it seems to have been written by Wilson, the basketball from Castaway. The only humans that can possibly understand less about how to socially interact with other people have been living alone a cave for the past fifty years, with the possible exception of a teenager with an Xbox.

Wiseau just doesn’t seem to have a clue how people talk to each other in real life. Johnny greets everyone he see’s with a perky “oh hai”, including a dog in a flower shop. This may not seem so bad on paper, but when you consider that at one point he does this while he’s in the middle of an angry monolgue defending himself against accusations of beating Lisa, then you start to question how realistic this all is.

But this is only the beginning of the bad dialogue. Actually that’s quite a big understatement. This is without a doubt one of the worst scripted things I have ever encountered. Somebody who speaks English as a second language, and has only learnt how to do that by listening to Katie Price audiobooks couldn’t have written this script any worse. My favourite lines can be seen here and really sum up how unnatural the whole script really is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpfPmvG6CHI

In several hilarious scenes, male bonding is represented by several of the main characters playing catch with an American football as they talk. In one scene they do this whilst all wearing tuxedos in some bizarre mix of Any Given Sunday and Reservoir Dogs. I think these were probably my favourite scenes though, as they are just so utterly bizarre.

The sex scenes between Tommy and Lisa are possibly the least erotic thing you’ll experience since having to kiss your grandmothers hairy cheek at Christmas. They seem to involve Johnny humping some part of Lisa’s body that the penis was never designed to enter. The fact that they happen so often is completely inexplicable. They add nothing to the movie and I can only imagine that Tommy Wiseau is the real life incarnation of Frank Reynolds from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, wanting to put as much sex into a movie as possible.

  

The editing choices in this movie are frankly bizarre. There are scenes in this movie that have absolutely no bearing on anything else. In one scene Denny (Phillip Haldiman) is being threatened by a drug dealer over a debt, until Johnny and Mark chase off the dealer. This is never mentioned afterwards and seems to be put in to add a little drama to the movie.

In another scene in the movie, Johnny and Mark go to a coffee shop, but waits behind two people who have no other bearing in the movie, before he gets served. Has there ever been another movie where you’re forced to queue with the characters while nothing much happens? To make things worse, this queuing actually has no purpose in the story either, as they sit down before they start to talk to each other.

The acting in this movie is so bad that you won’t be surprised to learn that only two of the actors (Robyn Paris and Greg Sestero) in this movie had ever had any experience acting before (outside of bit parts in movies or minor roles in tv shows). Even then Greg Sestero’s only major role was the lead in the straight to video Retro Puppet Master, hardly a shining endorsement.

Tommy Wiseau is probably the worst out of everybody. Is this due to purposeful bad acting or is he really as out of depth as Madonna was in Swept Away? It isn't just that he can't act though, his accent seems to from a country that no other human has ever come from. He often sounds like Jean Claude Van Damme doing an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation, whilst speaking through a mouthful of marbles. To make things worse, due to extremely poor editing, Johnnys voice rarely syncs with his mouth and you keep getting the feeling you’re watching a badly streamed tv show online.

All of this however adds up to one of the most hypnotic disasters since The Towering Inferno. This film is bad. I mean really bad. You’ll never quite understand how bad this is until you watch it. The thing is though, I urge you to watch this. If you love bad movies, then this really is a treat to watch. I guarantee you the next day you’ll be greeting everybody with “Oh hai”, and proclaiming that chickens go cheep cheep cheep. The best worst movie? I’m not sure I can support that claim. But second best at the very least.