By Robert Scucci
| Published
2003’s The Room has gone down in cinematic history as one of the worst movies ever made. It stars Tommy Wiseau, who wrote, directed, produced, funded, and wore about 1,000 other hats to bring his ill-fated romantic thriller to life. He made myriad misguided financial decisions along the way, like buying cameras instead of renting them, and filming the entire thing in both HD digital and on 35mm film at the same time so he could choose either format for the final movie. An expensive custom-made apparatus was designed to house both camera types because almost nobody had been crazy enough to try combining them that way. Despite this bizarre bit of cinematic innovation, only the 35mm version of the movie was used for the final cut.
When all was said and done, The Room took about six months to film, and Tommy Wiseau spent over $6 million of his own money on the thing. The script makes no sense, the acting is terrible, green screens and sound stages were used when they could have shot on location for a fraction of the cost, and it’s an absolute punisher of a film that has dominated midnight screenings where people throw spoons and footballs, yell “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” and celebrate what’s known around the world as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies.
In other words, The Room is so terrible it’s awesome, which leads us to The Room Returns, directed by Brando Crawford and starring Bob Odenkirk in place of Tommy Wiseau’s Johnny.
The Room Returns is special because Crawford wanted to approach the film the exact opposite way Wiseau approached it. He reused the script word for word, and the entire thing, even the apartment interiors, appears to have been shot in front of a green screen. He cold-emailed Bob Odenkirk, telling him he wanted to remake The Room in a single day to see if great actors could elevate the original script into something more palatable, and Odenkirk said yes without hesitation.
While there is some hearsay surrounding The Room Returns’ delayed release, I’m not here to fuel or dispel any rumors, but legend has it that Mr. Wiseau didn’t want this film, which was shot in 2023, to be released because it would undermine his own. It’s now available to rent for $7.99 thanks to Crawford, and all proceeds go to The Foundation for AIDS Research and the nonprofit Blue Collaborative, which supports independent artists. I got through my rental last night, and it’s better than anything I could have imagined.
The Room But With Less Rooms
Shot entirely in front of a green screen in less than 12 hours, The Room Returns is an absolute punisher. Beat for beat, line for line, it’s the same movie, but Brando Crawford was kind enough to spare us the sex scenes, instead preferring to show a black background with white text telling us who’s supposed to be having sex with who. In the original film, 11 percent of the runtime was devoted to a kind of unwholesomeness you need to be specially built to handle.
Like the original, The Room Returns follows Johnny (Bob Odenkirk), a wealthy investment banker who’s about to marry Lisa (Bella Heathcote), who’s having an affair with his best friend Mark (Brando Crawford). It’s a story about passion, betrayal, and, oh yeah… Denny (Cameron Kasky), who’s also in love with Lisa, but also mixed up with a violent drug dealer named Chris R. (portrayed by none other than The Room’s Greg Sestero) for reasons never explained in either film. The story still makes no sense, and the dialogue is still wooden, but Odenkirk really brings the goods here.
Every interview I’ve seen with the Better Call Saul star says pretty much the same thing. He’s reciting the script verbatim, either from memory or a teleprompter, and his whole method for elevating the dialogue is to space out the emotions to give the lines room to breathe. After claiming that “he did not hit her” in one of The Rooms most quotable scenes, he looks down, slowly raises his eyes, and sadly says, “Oh. Hi, Mark.” It’s the same lines, but delivered by somebody with some serious acting chops.
Now you may be asking, does this improve The Room? Absolutely not. The film is so far beyond saving, but you really can’t fault anybody working on The Room Returns. The acting only seems marginally better because they’re trying to stay faithful to the source material, which is an absolute wreck. What it does do, however, is add another layer of enjoyment to The Room because there’s a level of earnestness coming from Odenkirk that simply didn’t exist in the original film.
A Perfect Disasterpiece
If you’re not a fan of the original film, either in earnest or ironically, your mileage may vary with The Room Returns. I’m notoriously cheap, but I had to shell out the money to rent this because I knew it’d be a memorable watch. I also watch The Room once or twice a year and quote it until my wife kicks me out of the living room. It’s really cool that Brando Crawford just went for it, and even cooler that Bob Odenkirk immediately got on board to participate in the project.
It’s a fever dream that doesn’t really improve upon or detract from the original film. It simply exists, and I’m so glad it does. Now I know a new way to say “do you understand life?!” the next time I get into an argument. I now know that I can probably shoot a feature-length film using the stock backgrounds from Google Meet. And I can rest easy knowing that some insanely talented people tried to do the unthinkable for a great cause, and exceeded every expectation I had while I waited to finally feast my eyes on it.
The Room Returns is available to rent through Brando Crawford’s Gumroad site, and it supports a great cause. It’s also way more amusing than it has any right to be.
