Movie Reviews Of The Damned: The Room

I know I’m late to the party in reviewing Tommy Wiseau’s infamously bad movie The Room, but after viewing a midnight-screening last Friday at The Royal, I couldn’t resist.

This film is bad in an endearing way. You actually root for it to be worse. Can that be said of most movies, or any movie?

The plot, if it matters, is about successful banker Johnny (Wiseau) who’s engaged to the “very beautiful” Lisa (Juliette Danielle), a vindictive, manipulative woman who cheats on Johnny with his “best friend” Mark (Greg Sestero).

That’s the Coles notes version of what this movie is about. There’s about a dozen throwaway plotlines that are brought up and quickly forgotten, including Lisa’s mother having a terminal illness (“I got the results of the test back. I definitely have breast cancer.”), and Johnny and Lisa’s foster(?) son Denny getting mixed up with a drug dealer.

The AV Club put this at the top of their best bad movies of the decade list, and while the other 14 movies on that list are atrocious, they’re at least competently made. What makes The Room’s crappiness so great is that its director knows almost nothing about filmmaking, whether its screenwriting, acting, directing, or most importantly, editing.

There are scenes that are out of focus (probably due to the director’s ignorance about the difference between Hi Def and 35 mm film), the sound is out of synch with the actors' lips, and the same shots are used more than once (particularly in one of the movie’s not one but four hilarious love scenes).

Although Wiseau now claims it was meant to be bad, cast members from the movie say otherwise. In the end, it doesn’t matter if it was made that way on purpose or not (it wasn’t). It’s rollicking good entertainment, ideal for midnight-screenings, and movie nights with friends. But really, you owe it to yourself to watch it in the theatre at least once. If you’ve never seen people throw spoons and toss a football around a movie theatre before, it’s your only chance.