The Room

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.

The Room, has been maligned as one of the most inept movies ever made when in fact it is a sardonic comedy about sexual politics in the age of terror.

Given audience reaction at screening attended, pic may be something of a first: A movie that prompts most of its viewers to ask for their money back -- before even 30 minutes have passed.

One of the only films from the whole of the 21st Century to live up to every fragment of its hype.

If there is a 21st-century Edward D. Wood Jr., it is probably Tommy Wiseau.

What puts "The Room" in a class of its own is its overabundant idiocy. While you're still gasping at one of the film's moronic lines or vagrant plot knots, another one rises up to smack you in the head.

Trust me, you've gotta check this thing out at least once, especially if you like football.

To make a movie that's so bad it's good you need vision, drive, luck and obsessive vanity. Fortuitously, The Room's writer/producer/director/star Tommy Wiseau appears to possess all of these qualities, combined with a total lack of acting talent.

A movie so bad, so inept, so unbelievably painful, it's almost impossible to comprehend anyone thought it would be great on-screen...

The question becomes, How much punishment can the audience take and still keep on howling?

Watching The Room is like crossing over to a counterfactual universe where the rules of film grammar and screenwriting have been written by Dan Brown.

Cult-phenom amateur melodrama best left to adults.