How can a movie be so bad it’s good? I hope to know after watching a rare midnight screening of The Room (2003) this Saturday, a film advertised for being “The Worst Movie Ever Made!!” As one IMDB user put it: “there is something so magically wrong with this movie that it can only be the product of divine intervention.”
The Room is the product of a multi-threat who ended in multi-debt: Tommy Wiseau, a Hollywood nobody who individually raised six million dollars in order to make the film himself – since no one else wanted to. Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, executively produced, and starred in the movie, which he based on a play he created as well.
In short, the film exists only to showcase Wiseau’s glaring limitations as a director, writer, and performer. The Room stars amateur actors, whose voices are sometimes out of synch. They spend most of their time in a living room and on a rooftop, around which the digitally composed San Francisco landscape changes its relative location. There are four prolonged sex scenes, three of which are shot in the same bedroom, all of which are accompanied by R&B slow jams. The plot, I have heard, is also bad.
The film has become an Internet phenomenon and a cult classic. But getting your hands on it is tough. It plays at midnight screenings in L.A. and, oddly, Montreal. It is tradition that you BYOPS (bring your own plastic spoons [to throw]).
Bad movies are fun. But more than that, they offer a chance to explore the aesthetic of bad, the act of movie watching, and the nature of entertainment in general. I’m sure you share in my excitement.