There seems to be some debate over what is the WORST MOVIE
of all time. Of course, I’m not talking
about those awful low budget student productions which are so bad, they’re just
bad. I’m talking about the movies which
are soooooo bad, they’re really really good.
And we have two contenders.
In one corner, we have The Room (2003). This is Tommy Wiseau’s masterpiece which
deals with the passion and the pain of a modern romance that ends in
tragedy. With scenes that go nowhere,
transitions that leave you scratching your head, actors who don’t understand
the concept of subtlety and some very icky sex scenes, NOT TO MENTION a lead
actor who looks like a long-haired Quasimodo, The Room has all the right
ingredients to make something so wrong.
But equally fierce, I would like to present you with Troll 2
(1990) which has a cast of vegetarian goblins who make unsuspecting visitors
eat green food so that they turn into plants.
In this movie, we learn that a kick in the groin can make you into a
“homo” and coffee is the “devil’s drink”.
The most frightening aspect of this movie is that the director found
money and people to make this disaster.
As far as I know, both movies were meant to be serious
movies. The Room was meant to be a drama
and Troll 2 was apparently meant to be terrifying. But that’s what makes them great WORST
MOVIES. If the directors had tried to
make them as bad as they turned out to be, they never would have been as
good. Or as bad. Which is good.
I think.
But only one movie can be the WORST MOVIE so I took a very
analytical approach to come up with a winner.
I’ve compared these two movies with regards to the common goods we look
for in our so-bad-they’re-good movies.
Here are the results:
Gratuitous sex and nudity:
The Room gets off to a banging start with a scene that looks and sounds
like a 70s porno. There is soft music, a
red rose, weird moans and entangled limbs all shot through the gauzy filter of
the bed’s canopy. And did I mention
there is butt clenching? Yes, my
friends, there is MALE BUTT CLENCHING that just doesn’t stop. At least, it didn’t seem to stop. This scene is repeated a couple of times
throughout the movie and it doesn’t get any more tolerable by the third
time.
I don’t recall if there is any nudity
in Troll 2 but they probably would have had to pay the actors more if there had
been a nipple shot so they probably avoided it.
They do, however, have a sex scene which is just about the weirdest sex
scene I have ever seen in my life. It
involves corn and popcorn and well, you just have to see it because I’m not
sure if I could describe it. I have no
idea what the popcorn had to do with anything except perhaps to remind
audiences that they should buy more concessions or take a bathroom break.
The Room gets the edge.
Did I mention the butt clenching?
Ugggghhhhhh ….
Catchy One –Liners:
The Room has got so many great one-liners that you can purchase a
bobble-headed doll of Tommy Wiseau that spouts them out. My co-worker has one and this is how I was
first acquainted with the movie. Here
are some of my favorites …
“I’m fed up with this world!”
“Don’t touch me mothafucka!”
“You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”
“The candles, the music, the sexy dress. I mean, what's
going on here?”
By themselves, these quotes may not sound like much but you
have to hear them with the main character’s voice which is a cross, in my
humble opinion, between a Jersey accent and an Eastern European trash
accent. Yep, it’s as bad as you might
imagine. Who sounds like this? Okay, you’re right. I guess Tommy Wiseau does and who the hell
knows where he grew up.
Troll 2 also has its fair share of great one-liners.
“I’m the victim of a nocturnal rapture. I have to release my lowest instincts with a
woman.”
“Grandpa! Are you
really in hell?”
“And you can’t piss on hospitality! I WON’T ALLOW IT!”
“Joshua is not a little shit; he’s just very
sensitive.”
I’m gonna go with Troll 2.
Although The Room has some great lines and there are bonus points for
the obnoxious accent with which they are delivered, there seems to be more
variety and bite with Troll 2.
Awful Acting: You
can’t have the one-liners if you don’t have the atrocious delivery. Tommy Wiseau is just plain dreadful as the
lead character in The Room. When I was
watching him, I got the feeling that a dog turd would have more emotional
range. When he actually tries to emote,
it comes off as hysterically funny such as when he has a breakdown at the end
of the movie. He lets out these loud
groans which sound like he has a bad hairball caught in his throat and then he
trashes his apartment like an enraged Frankenstein. He is supported by an equally awful
cast. The actress who played Lisa should
get an annual razzie for her portrayal of the cheating girlfriend and her
mother who “definitely has breast cancer” spits out her monologues as if she is
reading off a teleprompter. I pity the
guy who played Mark (Greg Sestero) who probably regrets ever being credited in
this disaster.
Troll 2 has a uniformly horrible cast. From the overzealous dad who takes his family
to a town inhabited by Goblins to the grandpa who has the creepiest pedophile
grin I’ve ever seen in a movie, there is not one redeeming actor in the bunch. All the lines are delivered in an inappropriate
way and a special mention should go to the wicked witchy lady who has never met
a piece of dialogue that she didn’t want to punctuate with crazy eyes and weird
smiles. Thankfully, most of these actors
realized that they shouldn’t give up their day jobs. At the screening of Troll 2, George Hardy
(who played the dad) was there and he is now a dentist in Alabama. Good choice, George.
I’m gonna give the nod to Troll 2. Tommy Wiseau is in a league all of his own
but as an ensemble, Troll 2 should get the award.
Outrageous Plot: The Room is really a very simple movie and without the bad
acting, the unrealistic dialogue, the heaving body parts, it is quite
boring. It’s about a girl who doesn’t
love her boyfriend anymore so she decides to sleep with his best friend. The boyfriend finds out about her cheatin’
ways and he *SPOILER ALERT* blows his head off in slow motion. Everyone is sad and that’s the end.
Troll 2 is just completely f*#@ng nuts. It’s about a family who goes on a vacation to
Nilbog which is a town that is full of goblins.
Not trolls but goblins. (The
reality is that there aren’t any Trolls in Troll 2). *SPOILER ALERT* These goblins are vegetarian so they turn
people into plants and then eat them.
How great is that?! I’ll give
them points for such a gruesome storyline because after all, I would not want
to be turned into foliage and then have my extremities munched on by a bunch of
ripened dwarfs. That is a little
terrifying when you think about it. But
then it gets better. How do you kill
these things? You use a Bologna sandwich
which has CHOLESTEROL and TOXINS!
There is no way that The Room can compete with the madness
in Troll 2. And that Bologna sandwich is
a huge plot twist that I didn’t see coming AT ALL. Kudos to the monsters.
It’s pretty close.
Both The Room and Troll 2 raise bad moviemaking to a fine art form and I
congratulate both of them for their twisted endeavors. But, like in all those award shows, a winner
must be chosen and so, for the WORST MOVIE, I choose ….
Troll 2. It does
everything right … er, I mean wrong.
And for that, I am
thankful.
