Review of The Room (2003) by Jason R — 05 Dec 2017

There's bad, then there's bad that's so awful it hits you like running full speed into a wall. Ninja Turtle movies are bad. Anything by Uwe Boll is bad. This is next level terrible. Tommy Wiseau's vanity project, this Tennessee Williams-wannabe nonsense is so terrible that mere words aren't enough to describe it.

The plot, if you want to call it that, is contrived nonsense that features more sex scenes in the first half hour than in some Skinemax flicks, and overlong dialogue in desperate need of editing. There are scenes that go nowhere, lots of conversation that is meaningless, and characters that are underdeveloped and whose appearances make no sense.

If you like long shots of San Francisco, this is definitely the movie for that. Most films use one or two expository shots, adding more if the film is picking up from a specific spot in a city, but for a long time, this movie stays primarily in the apartment, and has its characters engage in repetitive, meaningless conversation, like a cancer diagnosis being blown right past with no reaction from either character in the scene.

Watching the Rifftrax version of this film is the only way it is watchable. That is an easy 10/10, and even as an MST3K fan, I've not laughed that hard in a long time.

On its own, this movie is a pointless slog that needed someone to seriously check Tommy Wiseau's ego. It's horribly unwatchable, nothing happens of consequence until the birthday party, so that's an hour of time you can easily bypass and miss nothing, and the only real highlight for me is when Johnny blows his own head off. That itself should say everything about The Room.

That said, I feel like The Disaster Artist will be a great telling of the making of this movie, as it's clear there had to be a lot of wacky shenanigans going on behind the scenes, and I'm looking forward to seeing how they played out.

But the movie itself? Ye gads. Horrible. But I'll rewatch the Rifftrax version over and over again, no doubt about that.