Review #1,300: 'The Room' (2003)

Terrible movies flood our screens every year. Some will make you want to demand your money back or simply tear your eyes from their sockets in a bid to end the suffering, but chances are, once it's finally over, you'll never think about it again. There are plenty of terrible bad movies, but great bad movies - those that truly stick with you - are in an incredibly short supply. There's a real art to creating something so jaw-droppingly bad, so head-scratchingly awful that you start to question your very existence. Tommy Wiseau's The Room, commonly referred to as the Citizen Kane of bad movies, has this art perfected. When the film trickled into selected theatres back in 2003, nobody could have predicted the impact it would have. Nobody, that is, apart from narcissistic writer, director, producer and star Tommy Wiseau.

Only Wiseau undoubtedly had visions of being showered with admiration and awards, even timing the film's release to qualify for the Academy Awards. Instead, The Room quickly developed a reputation as a side-show, screened regularly as part of the midnight movie circuit where audience members would shout the movie's memorable catch-phrases and hurl plastic cutlery at the screen. Wiseau has since explained that The Room was always meant to be a black comedy and never intended for it to be taken seriously, but that's about as believable as the director's claims that he was born in America. In fact, nothing about The Room is believable, from the wobbly-looking sets and wooden actors to the stilted dialogue and painfully long sex scenes. When you discover that this actually cost $6 million to make - somehow funded by Wiseau himself - you'll be wondering how the hell it ended up looking like an Australian soap opera.

Wiseau plays Johnny, a wealthy banker who seemingly possesses no character flaws. He has the appearance of a weather-beaten vampire with a head full of tar-dunked hair and a voice that resembles Christopher Walken if the King of New York actor was born in Eastern Europe and had suffered a stroke. His "future wife" Lisa (Juliette Danielle) has grown bored with Johnny and infatuated with his handsome best friend Mark (Greg Sestero). Despite pleas from her mother Claudette (Carolyn Minnott) to stay with the man who will take care of her financially, Lisa seduces Mark. After a night of drinking, Lisa falsely accuses Johnny of hitting her ("I did not hit her! I did naaaht!"). But being the optimistic, all-round great guy that he is, Johnny doesn't let this get in the way of emotionally supporting his young neighbour Denny (Philip Haldiman), the man-boy orphan who Johnny treats like a son, or to throw on a tuxedo for a game of catch with his buddies.

The Room resembles a 100-minute sitcom episode during which one or two sets are visited by a roster of minor characters that in no way resembles real life. Sub-plots, such as Denny landing himself in trouble with a gun-wielding drug dealer or Claudette's revelation that she has cancer, are introduced only to be never discussed again. Rather than exploring the characters by actually giving them something to do other than walk into a room and offer mundane advice, Wiseau would rather give us no fewer than four extended sex scenes, three of which involving the filmmaker's bare arse thrusting against Danielle's stomach. Scenes play out on rooftops and alleyways that are clearly sets with a green-screen backdrop, raising the question of why Wiseau didn't simply shoot on location. But thanks to endless establishing shots of San Francisco landmarks, we know that they're definitely not in a Los Angeles studio. It would be easy to talk about The Room for hours and not even scratch the surface of just how strange yet utterly fascinating it is. See it, hate it, and then love it. And tell your friends to do the same.


Directed by: Tommy Wiseau
Starring: Tommy Wiseau, Greg Sestero, Juliette Danielle, Philip Haldiman, Carolyn Minnott
Country: USA

Rating: *

Tom Gillespie