Vintage Trashwire – The Room is the Citizen Kane of crap
At Trashwire, we love bad movies. Bad acting, bad direction, bad costumes, bad music; all these elements are important in creating a work of true cinema trash. While there are some bad movies that are just a cut above the rest, Showgirls comes to mind, there is one movie that I can safely declare as the best bad movie ever produced.
Writer, director, actor and producer Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 classic The Room has every element necessary for a truly terrible film. The script is worse than something a 14 year-old would write, the acting is atrocious, the music is ghastly and dated, the cinematography could have been done by Stevie Wonder, and the love scenes are practically vomit-inducing. In other words, this film is sheer perfection of awfulness.
The main character is Johnny, played by Wiseau, a 100% good guy who is too trusting and taken advantage of by everyone around him. His fiancé, or “future wife” as they say three dozen times in the movie, is Lisa, a selfish slutty girl played by Courtney Love look-alike Juliet Danielle. Lisa begins having an affair with Johnny’s best friend Mark, probably the best looking guy in this freak show. Of course, Lisa’s mother Claudette objects to this because Johnny is rich and Lisa should be with a guy who can take care of her. If that wasn’t enough one-dimensional garbage, they also threw in Denny, a weird younger boy that Johnny takes care of. In the film, they mention that Johnny is paying for Denny’s college, but Denny seems to jump from age 13 to 20 in every scene. In one scene, he’s super stoked to throw a football around with Johnny, then in the next, he’s buying drugs and having his life threatened by a man who is in one scene, and then vanishes from the story line altogether. The film is also filled with random secondary characters like Michelle, Lisa and Johnny’s friend, and her boyfriend or one guy whom we have dubbed “Moral Guy” who suddenly appears during the party scene to give Lisa advice about ending her affair.
While films like From Justin to Kelly may have bad scripts and bad acting, they look like Schindler’s List compared to The Room. In one of my favorite scenes, Lisa is talking to her mother Claudette when, from out of nowhere, Claudette remarks, “Everything goes wrong at once. Nobody wants to help me, and I’m dying. I got the results of the test back, I definitely have breast cancer.” Never has a line about breast cancer been delivered so unenthusiastically. The best pat of the line is that Claudette’s breast cancer is never mentioned again in the entire film. But that’s just one of many items that are never paid off. The film is filled with what appear to be subplots that simply go nowhere.
In one scene, Denny is confronted by “Chris R” a drug dealer who screams that Denny owes him money about 800 times in the short scene. Suddenly, the entire rest of the cast appears out of nowhere to rescue Denny from Chris R’s threats and Denny remarks, “It’s ok he’s going to jail.” That is the last we hear about Chris R, yet another plot line that is never paid off.
The acting and writing aren’t the only shockingly bad things about The Room. The love scenes are truly an accomplishment in repulsiveness. In the first love scene, just a few minutes into the film, Johnny and Lisa have sex while accompanied by every awful movie cliché ever made. There’s rose petals, dated early 90s R&B music, slow tracking shots and dissolves through the silky decorated bed, and far too many shots of Wiseau in the buff. As my friend John Shortino put it, “You see way too much of that man’s ass!” I couldn’t agree more.
It’s very fitting that I mention the great Shortino in this review because he was the one who introduced me to this gem of bad cinema. Knowing how much I love bad movies, he asked if I’d ever seen The Room. When I said that I hadn’t he let me borrow his DVD and my life hasn’t been the same since. What I once thought was bad simply pales in comparison to this.
This film is required viewing for any Trashwire fan. While not available on Netflix, it is for sale on Amazon for a very reasonable $11.99. It’s worth every penny for 99 minutes of staggeringly bad cinema the likes of which have ever been seen. I uploaded some clips from the film to YouTube so you can get a taste of exactly what I’m talking about when I proclaim The Room to be the best bad movie ever made.
“With the passion of Tennessee Williams”?! View the trailer here
Buy The Room for only $11.99 here
And watch the clips here
