Culture

Directed by Tommy Wiseau, (5/5).
Move over Troll 2 and Plan 9 from Outer Space: The Room is the pinnacle of the so-bad-it’s-funny film. Tommy Wiseau is credited with starring in, directing, writing, producing and executive producing the film, although he’s barely done any of them well enough to count. This film could be one of the most entertaining things you’ll ever see, especially as the whole thing is deadly serious (its original tag-line was “can you ever really trust anyone?”).

 
The first half hour is dominated so completely by abysmal dialogue and bad sex scenes it would be porn if it had a chance of turning anyone on. We get the outline of the film’s “plot”: Johnny (Wiseau) is going to marry his girlfriend Lisa, but she doesn’t love him and is sleeping with Mark, who we know is Johnny’s best friend because we are told so at every possible opportunity. The rest of the film is an assortment of vaguely related scenes in which we find out that Lisa’s mum has breast cancer, Tommy’s friend Denny is in trouble with a drug-dealer (both of these things are mentioned briefly and then dropped), Johnny is having a birthday party, and that women are inherently evil.
 

True to its title, virtually every scene takes place in the same room or on a roof in an unexplained location, all linked together by endless stock footage of San Francisco. The acting is universally appalling, but no one come close to matching Wiseau. He is mostly expressionless and incoherent, although he occasionally breaks into sudden emotion for a sentence or two. His out-of-place foreign accent makes all of his lines funny, especially when he is greeting people with a loud “Oh hai!”

 
What truly makes the film consistently funny from one scene to next is the dialogue, which varies between unbelievable statements (“Did you know that chocolate is the symbol of love?”) and equally implausible reactions (“You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”). If something is obvious, someone has to ask what’s going on, and every time someone leaves a scene, they first announce that they “have to go now”. It’s essentially laughter from start to finish, as somehow the hilarious lack of quality is maintained for the full 90 minutes. Don’t miss it.