The Room

Throughout the history of cinema, there have been, as with any other form of art, ups and downs. You can get beautiful, breath-taking classics such as The Godfather, Casablanca, and Gone With The Wind. And on the other hand, you've got the movies that are so bad that every other scene makes you slap your forehead. However, there are those diamond-in-the-rough films that exceed our expectations. Not only are they bad, they're so bad that they're good.

Few movies enter this realm. Most notable are the works of Ed Wood, who was immortalized in Tim Burton's biopic titled, well, Ed Wood. Wood made a series of terrible B-movie creature features in the 1950's, his most famous being Plan 9 From Outer Space.

I bring to you now a movie that challenges the boundaries of bad-moviedom: The Room.

The Room is the brainchild of Tommy Wiseau, which he chose to direct, produce, write, and star in. You know, kind of like Orson Welles. Except worse.

Much, much worse.

Now, before I get to describing the plot-line and other parts of this movie, I need to describe Tommy Wiseau. He is a nauseatingly greasy looking man with long, black hair, with a face that looks like it's made of broken granite that's been attacked by a blunt hatchet. He has a bizarre, untraceable accent that sounds sort of Eastern European (however, the guy allegedly grew up in the US) and was able to suspiciously raise millions of dollars for his production, and yet he still managed to make it look like it had a budget of $600.

Moving on, the movie itself chronicles Tommy Wiseau Marty Stu Johnny, a well-adjusted, popular, charitable, successful business man who everyone loves and thinks is so wonderful. He is deeply in love with his "future wife", Lisa, who the entire cast spends half the movie reminding us how beautiful she is. Along with his bearded best friend Mark, and his creepy man-child neighbor Denny, Johnny considers himself the luckiest guy in the world. What he doesn't know, however, is that the beautiful Lisa is secretly an evil, conniving She-Devil, and cheating on Johnny with Mark.

I...I don't even know where to start to explain how unbelievably terrible this movie is. In fact, this movie should be used as an example for up-and-coming directors to educate them on what not to do when making a movie. There are so many careless errors in it that it builds up into this complete monstrosity of failure. The script alone makes me think Tommy Wiseau may not be from this planet; I mean, there’s poorly written, and then there’s “I don’t know how humans properly act.” Wiseau’s script falls in that second category. You get catchy, totally legitimate one-liners such as, “I am so glad to have you as my best friend, and I love Lisa so much”, “Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!” and everyone’s favorite, the classic, “Anyway, how’s your sex life?”

Of course, there are a lot more reasons why it’s bad; I could write a whole damned book on how ridiculously terrible this movie is. The actors are awkward and amateur (especially lead actor Wiseau) and the set is just plain bizarre—there is an obnoxious abundance of stock footage, and instead of just filming the multiple roof scenes on a roof, they built a set and used a very noticeable green screen—what?

Oh, and there a framed photographs of spoons all over Lisa and Johnny's apartment.

You can see this bad-movie gem yourself, if you like—it was filmed in 2003, so it’s not exactly rare. You can warm yourself up by watching scenes uploaded on YouTube. The best ones are the compilations of how many times all the characters great each other by acting surprised and saying, "Oh, hi [insert name here]!" in a painfully dull tone (trust me, it happens a lot). However, if you really think it sounds as fun as a barrel of monkeys, you can jump right in and go to midnight showings around New York City. That’s right—midnight showings. This film is starting to give Rocky Horror a run for its money in the cult classic race.