Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 49: Sun Feb 18

The Room (Wiseau, 2003): Prince Charles Cinema, 12.15pm, 3pm & 5.45pm


Move aside The Sound of Music and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Room is the modern-day Plan 9 From Outer Space and a movie so awful it now has a cult following, a following so large that the Prince Charles has nine screenings planned over the weekend - and most of them are sold out. If you want some background to the film it's all here in a fine piece which appeared in the Telegraph in 2009. If you want a flavour of the movie here is an extract.

The Prince Charles have regular screenings of The Room but the cause of all the excitement this time is that the director, Tommy Wiseau, is in town and will be delivering live intro and be around for a Q&A after every screening. You can get all the details here via the cinema website.

Chicago Reader review:
'Written, produced, and directed by Tommy Wiseau, this inept 2003 melodrama has become a Rocky Horror-style cult favorite in Los Angeles and other cities. Wiseau stars as an eerily placid and good-natured banker whose live-in girlfriend is secretly getting it on with his best friend, though the filmmaker often strikes out in different directions, only to bump into the wall and come back. As someone who's watched more bad movies than you can imagine, I'm mostly immune to the so-bad-it's-good aesthetic, though I can see how, viewed in a theater at midnight after a few drinks, this might conjure up its own hilariously demented reality. Poignantly, Wiseau has now positioned the movie as a "black comedy."
JR Jones

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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