BLAIR WOYNARSKI
Arts Writer

You may have heard from a Facebook friend of your second cousin that The Room is a bad movie.

Rest assured, it’s not. The Room is the bad movie. It is the bad movie to define a generation. It has actually been called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.” Not since Plan 9 from Outer Space has a bad movie captured the hearts and minds of so many.

And now you’re wondering what, exactly, is The Room? It’s quite simple. The Room is a drawing-room drama given to us by visionary Tommy Wiseau, who took the mantle of writer, producer, director and star. Wiseau is a man of mysterious origins, who speaks with an accent described by one reviewer as “Croatian cyborg.”

The Room was a pet project of his that did not get mainstream support, so he secured $6 million in funding by (allegedly) importing leather jackets from South Korea. Before you get excited, I should point out that most of that money went to marketing, in the form of a giant billboard he kept in downtown L.A. for five years. Yeah.

In the seven years since its release, The Room has become something of a cult hit, with midnight screenings across North America. Millions have partaken of this masterpiece, and now, you can too. The Roxy Theatre is hosting a midnight screening on Oct. 16, and the experience is not one to be passed up.

The plot is simple. Wiseau plays Johnny, a man who holds some job at a bank and has just been denied a promotion, though he still has a seemingly unlimited supply of money. Johnny is hopelessly in love with his fiancée Lisa, with whom he’s been together for either five or seven years, depending on where you are in the script. Lisa has come to decide she doesn’t love Johnny anymore but instead of breaking off the engagement, she carries on an affair with his best friend, Mark, spreads vicious rumours and concocts a scheme so convoluted there’s no way even she understands it.

This twisted love triangle spins intrigue, deceit and betrayal, while the film also tackles tough issues like cancer, drug addiction, alcoholism, teen crime, the joy of throwing footballs, mental disability, the plight of the working man, cutlery appreciation and the breakdown of capitalism. How does it cover all these issues, you ask? Quite easily, as long as it doesn’t bother with any sort of coherency or unity of action.

The Room is filled with actors you have never seen before and will never see again. They bring forward memorable characters like Lisa’s self-obsessed mother Claudette, who alternates between robotically emotionless and frantically hysterical, and Denny, the well-meaning neighbour boy so staggeringly lacking in anything approximating normal social skills that Wiseau retrospectively commented that he was “really retarded a little bit.”

As a presentation of human interaction, it is mind-boggling. People behave without any visible motivation, they abruptly end conversations that they just started, they suffer inexplicable personality changes and Johnny and his friends can think of nothing better to do than throw a football back and forth every time they’re together. And that’s just the beginning.

Plotlines are introduced that never lead anywhere, characters pop into the frame out of nowhere, dialogue is overdubbed and horribly out of sync, characters appear and vanish with no explanation, there are scenes with no sense of congruency with the rest of the plot, and it contains the most horrid green-screening you’ll ever see. It includes some of the most awkward sex scenes out there, complete with a soundtrack of what appears to be a late ’90s pop group that lacked the emotional depth and artistic deftness of N’Sync. It also takes place in San Francisco and you won’t forget that because every scene is intercut with a stock image of the San Francisco skyline, accompanied by a melody best suited to a soap opera about Harry Potter on a pirate ship.

When I call this film a masterpiece, please understand the full extent of what I am saying. The Room is Tommy Wiseau’s opus, his Ninth Symphony, his Mona Lisa. He has attempted, more recently, to remarket it as a dark comedy. But it’s not. It is a drama that fails in every possible way a film can fail. The staggering ineptness is prevalent in every frame. It is bad in a way that no other movie is, and it must be shared with the world.

You are guaranteed to burst out laughing at the very first line of dialogue. And it doesn’t let up. Every scene is a new adventure, every moment a double-fudge sundae of ooey-gooey ridiculousness. The entertainment value is unparalleled. But don’t take my word for it. You mustn’t, because words cannot begin to do it justice. Like The Matrix, you have to see it for yourself.

I dream of a world where “Oh hai Denny” and “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART, LISA!” are as ubiquitous as “I’ll be back” and “I am your father.” Centuries from now, The Room will pass into legend, and people will whisper about what it might have been. But we are the few who get to experience it. And it will be glorious.

The Roxy Theatre is hosting a midnight screening on Oct. 16.