We’ve all seen the memes about The Room, and know about its strange and often unintentionally funny creator, Tommy Wiseau. You may have also seen The Disasteꦛr Artist, a biographical comedy-drama film starring both Dave and James Franco, charting Wiseau’s life before, during, and after the creation of The𒉰 Room. Wiseau is now making another movie, and it looks absolutely awful.
If you’ve never heard of it, The Room was directed, written, and produced by Wiseau in 2003 and achieved cult status for being widely co☂nsidered the worst film ever made. It was initially written as a play, then adapted into a 540-page book that Wiseau couldn’t get published – so he turned to film. The movie revolves around a love triangle between Johnny, a banker (played by Wiseau⭕ himself), Lisa, his fiancée, and his best friend, Mark.
The film is notoriousl♑y meandering, with most of the subplots left unresolved. There are damning technical and narrative flaws, and Wiseau’s acting… well, . It’s not a good film, but that’s why people love it. It’s hysterically funny without trying to be – in fact, it takes itself so seriously that it’s almost painful to watch. It’s camp, puꦡre and simple. Wiseau later made a series called The Neighbours that was somehow even worse.
Now, he’s just released a trailer for a new movie called Big Shark, a horror drama film that follows three firefighters as they save New Orleans from a killer shark. That’s from the official synopsis – it’s impossible to tell much from the trailer itself. What we see in the actual trailer are men that I assume are two of the main characters in a boxing ring (most of the trailer is them fighting), big red letters claiming that Big Shark is ‘the next epic’ directed by ‘visionary director Tommy Wiseau’, a whole ton of killer sha🧜rk cliches, the shark falling vertically into the boxing ring, and one particularly horrible shot of the shark bursting through a wall, the street outside flooding and two men sprinting away from it.
The tr꧃ailer has the worst CGI I’ve seen in my life, absolutely terrible production value, and it closes over the sound of what I assume is Wiseau screaming. I’ve seen student films with more potential. At first, I thought the film was a shameless cash grab on the part of some big studio that knew the viral potential a new Wiseau film could have, but Big Shark is produced by Wiseau’s own company. Then I thought, maybe he’s capitalising on his own notoriety to make money off a new film, knowing it’ll get hate-watched. Surely he knows how the world sees him, and the baggage that will always come along with his name. The trail🦩er even seems to embrace this, with its bombastic language and praise for its own director – it’s almost tongue-in-cheek.
A more generous interpretation, and one I’d prefer to believe for my own mental health, is that Wiseau just has an enduring, irrational faith in his own vision, believes that he can make something good, and is trying to prove that he can. If only all artists had the tenacity t🧔o keep creating and advocating for themselves after having their art ridiculed – though I can’t imagine many people have been roasted at the scale that Wiseau has.
I know what I said about the movie looking like shit, and it does, but I’m going to watch the hell out of it anyway. Not because I think it’ll be good, or even make for fodder to rag on Wiseau for even more, but because I think it’ll be fun. I just know I’ll be crying laughing the whole time, and the film won’t be good, but that isn’t always why people watch films. Sometimes I just want to see a massive shark in a boᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚxing ring, terrorising a group of grown men, and I think I should be allowed that.