Budget: $6,000,000
What is there to be said about The Room that hasn't already been said? It has a book about its making, a movie based on the book about its making, a "where are they now" mockumentary, and a documentary about it's making currently held up in the courts thanks to a lawsuit filed by The Room writer and director, Tommy Wiseau. (Room Full of Spoons, if you are interested in following). It even now has a cult following complete with midnight showings across the country, costumes, and spoons thrown at the screen in unison by an adoring audience.
I am late to the party.
If YOU haven't seen the room, you owe it to yourself to watch it because it is quickly becoming part of our cultural lexicon. The next time you're out with friends and someone glibly says "oh hi Mark" or yells "where's my FUCKING money, Denny?!?" or laments "you're TEARING me apart, Lisa!!"... you'll kick yourself for being out of the loop. Unfortunately, cultural relevance is all you will get from The Room because it sucks.
For all of its faults, The Room made me think. It made me think about what truly makes a bad movie. I no longer believe that you can truly have a bad movie if you are not trying to make a good movie: in other words, if you are just slapping something together for a quick release to the drive-ins or to take advantage of some craze like talking babies, everyone knows it and won't fault you for your pathetic dialogue, unsynchronized audio, and terrible special effects. If, on the other hand, you set out to make an academy award winning movie, spend six million dollars, and 15 years after your movie bombs at the box office, you still think you have a cinematic gem on your hands, you might qualify for the worst movie of all time... like The Room.
Let's put things into perspective: Napoleon Dynamite was made for $400,000. Granted, it was no On The Waterfront, but it was well written, well acted, it looked like a real movie, the audio was synchronized with the pictures, and it was intentionally funny! The Room had none of those things:
- The love scenes are soooo bad that they made me uncomfortable to watch with my wife. I felt like Mike Pence watching the Miss America swimsuit competition;
- About 25% of the dialogue is easily heard and matches the pictures on the screen, the rest is clearly awkward retakes or Wiseau mumbling lines;
- I had an epiphany watching football on Sunday that Aaron Rogers is a better actor in those dumb State Farm commercials than Wiseau ever will be;
- The script is so bad that you can't help but feel bad for everyone else involved in this movie, especially after you know the rest of the story;
- I have no idea what this is about. I think it's about how about how terrible people are, but that friends are important and fun to play football with, and not to get caught up in drugs, and that women are really good for nothing more than ordering you a pizza after a long day at work, but that your best friend is probably fucking your fiancée anyway, and, finally, in the end love just isn't worth the headache so you should probably just not bother.
In summary, I just don't think movies like Creeping Terror or Plan 9 will ever compare to Battlefield Earth or The Room, because No One ever expected them to be good. It is when a person sets out to make a good movie with a sizeable budget and still delivers a mess that all the faults are amplified by factors of 10 and the product enters the rarified air of truly bad cinema. The Room sets the standard for faults amplified by a factor of 10.
I give The Room a -10 for delivering the whole package of bad movie requirements: undiscernible plot, worst actor I've ever seen (Wiseau), shitty sets poorly filmed, awkward unsynchronized dialogue, horrifically uncomfortable sex scenes complete with recycled footage, and a director who truly thought this would be in the running for an academy award.
(throw spoons now)
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