The Room (2003)

This inept 2003 melodrama has become a Rocky Horror-style cult favorite...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.

Tommy Wiseau's film oozes sincerity, which is then slathered in a thick coating of oblivious narcissism, and sadly serves as an example that not everyone should follow their bliss...It's the emotional earnestness that places The Room squarely within Susan Sontag's famous definition of pure camp.

You can laugh at lines like: "Hey, everybody, let's go inside and eat some cake"; "Leave your stupid comments in your pocket!"; "Man, I just can't figure women out. Sometimes they're just too smart. Sometimes they're flat out stupid. Other times they're just evil." In Wiseau's worldview, if "The Room" were a woman, she wouldn't be "evil" or "too smart." That leaves "flat-out stupid." [12 Feb 2012, p.B2]

The Room marks the writing-directing-acting debut of Tommy Wiseau, who's not just one of the most unusual looking and sounding (with an unidentifiable Eastern European accent) leading men ever to grace the screen, but a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny" seem the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint.

That’s the trick to making a cult film. It can’t just be bad, it has to be memorably so, and The Room is.