“The Room” is So Terrible You Can’t Help Loving It
Tangled webs of emotion and complex relationships are an integral part of this movie, creating drama between the characters, much in the same way a Tennessee Williams story does. This treachery leaves you wondering as the viewer whether you can ever really trust anyone, even people who are supposed to be your friends. Lastly, this film really is a hilarious dark comedy, but mainly for its own horrendous production value.
“”The Room” follows the life of a businessman named Johnny played by actor, director, producer, and writer Tommy Wiseau. Johnny is a relationship oriented man whose only real shortcoming from what we can tell is that he cares immensely for those close to him and trusts them unconditionally. Johnny showers his girlfriend Lisa with gifts and he has taken in a college student named Denny whom he raises like a son.
Right from the start it’s revealed that Johnny’s future wife Lisa is sneaking around behind is back to sleep with his best friend Mark. Lisa is an evil and manipulative woman with no regard for Johnny’s feelings. She pushes Mark to continue the affair despite his attempts to end it, and tells lies about Johnny behind his back to her mother to make him look bad.
The tension continues to mount on Lisa and Mark as they try to keep their affair a secret from those around them. Lisa brags about her infidelity to her disapproving mother and her friend, who do very little to stop her. Mark and Lisa build confidence the longer they are together, becoming increasingly more brazen until they publicly display their relationship in front of Johnny and his friends.
As a director, Wiseau is not visually inventive with his style. There are periodic panning shots of the San Francisco scenery interlaced with cheesy music that seem to have no relevance to the story. His love scenes are obscured by an object in the foreground which at first is somewhat interesting, but becomes tiring quickly.
Wiseau’s the dialogue is poorly written, often cramming more sentences in a short span than the viewer can take in. One clear example of this involves Johnny’s trip to the florist, which is only 19 seconds but contains several lines exchanged by the characters. Even worse than the quality of the writing itself, is the dubbing for the audio, which in some instances is completely out of sync from the actors’ mouths.
By no means is this a good movie, and it does not exactly to pretend to be. “The Room” is wildly hilarious simply for how terrible its production value is, and I hope Wiseau realizes it to at least some degree. If you like to watch movies that are so bad, you’ll be laughing, definitely check this one out.
My Grade: F for the content, A for hilarity