Some films go down as the greatest of their era. Some go down as the greatest of any era. Some go down as the worst of their era, and then trickle down into being
the worst of any era. But some
films, a rare few, manage to find a middle ground: Something that by all
rationality should go down as one of the worst but is instead remembered as something
great.
There’s been quite a few examples of this in my lifetime alone. The
all-round shoddy production values of the Birdemic films have kept coathangers
in everyone’s hands since the first one’s release in 2010. M. Night Shyamalan,
for many years, was regarded as one of the absolute worst, with such crowning
jewels of hilariously awful as The Happening and After Earth under his belt.
Hell, depending on who you ask, even the Twilight series enters into this realm
of reputation. But for my money, no singular bad film has given me more joy
than Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 magnum opus The Room.
And apparently, I’m not the only
one, seeing as the film’s reputation has grown so much over the last few years
that we now have a Hollywood production all about the making of the infamous
classic. But how does it hold up?
Right from the jump, this film’s mere existence feels like
mainstream teething problems with the latest piece of ‘so bad it’s good’
cinema. It’s a little too easy to imagine this being pitched to a distributor
like Lionsgate on the basis that The Room, and the film-behind-the-film The
Disaster Artist, are becoming uber-popular and deciding to put its most
recognisable stars in something that actually looks like a film. Like everyone
at the table forgot that one of The Room’s biggest draws was because its acting
was baffling, but not actually good.
It’s like if someone saw how much traction Neil Breen was getting, and decided
to cast him in an indie coming-of-age drama. It’s baffling… until the real reason for its existence is
revealed.
