Re-Evaluating Bad Movies

Four Rooms



When I was a teenager going through the films of Quentin Tarantino, Four Rooms was always this strange thing I'd see sitting on his filmography on IMDB. An anthology film Tarantino directed a segment for, the film had (and still has) an appallingly low Rotten Tomatoes score and was never really brought up by Tarantino or anyone else. All these years later, I've finally caught up with this strange little footnote and, yeah, it's fucking terrible. The gimmick here is that Tim Roth as just been hired as the bellhop for a hotel on New Years Eve and each story is another wacky adventure with various guests. The first story, directed by Alison Anders, sees a convent of witches engaging in a ritual which eventually involves having sex with Roth's bellhop. This first short is painfully unfunny and goes nowhere. Anders had broken through some years prior with a small-town drama called Gas Food Lodging, but she seems well out of her element for this kind of supernatural comedy. There's no comic spark and the staging is very boring.

The second short, directed by Alexandre Rockwell, sees Roth held at gun point and by a deranged man and placed in a weird psycho-sexual drama involving the man's wife. This short is also painfully unfunny and goes nowhere, though it has a more pronounced visual style with dramatic lighting and color, as well as distortion of space through extreme angles. Then again, this short is so aggressively frenetic that it ends up being more annoying so pick your poison I guess. The third short is directed by Robert Rodriguez and is a genuine bright spot in this mess. The premise here is a mob tough guy tasks Roth with watching his kids while he and the misses go out to celebrate. It's a simple premise and there isn't a lot to it, but the story actually escalates and culminates on a joke rather than just stopping, while Rodriguez's stylistic devices actually add to the comedy. This short also benefits greatly from a very fun turn from Antonio Banderas the mob heavy which pokes fun at his own bravado. I don't want to oversell this short, there isn't a lot to it and Roth continues to be incredibly annoying, but it works and gets some laughs which is a massive improvement of what preceded it.

And finally, we come to the big QT himself. Tarantino's closer is certainly better than the first two, but it's still a rather aimless affair that doesn't offer much. Basically, Roth is invited up to a suite of a Hollywood megastar (played by Tarantino himself) and gets sucked into a weird bet inspired by an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode. There is a story here and Tarantino's gift for dialogue does liven things up, but it isn't especially funny or dramatic or interesting. It's just kind of a thing that happens and while less irritating than Anders or Rockwell's shorts, it doesn't come close to the highs Rodriguez brought. If this had been the beginning of the anthology it might have worked as a semi-intriguing introduction, but as a climax it's pretty inert and easily Tarantino's worst work as a director.

So, what happened here? I can't say I did any real research on this film's production but this seems a pretty clear case of egos run amuck. Pulp Fiction had become a game-changing hit and a new generation of young indie filmmakers seem destined to overtake Hollywood. The result is this mess of a movie that's way too high on it's own supply, its directors indulging in whatever whims they wanted without stopping to think if this collaboration was actually any good. It actually reminds me a lot of amateur films, more about making a movie than thinking through the craft or substance. Tarantino and Rodriguez would quickly rebound with a far more fruitful collaboration in From Dusk Til Dawn while Anders and Rockwell would take on less and less high-profile projects before transitioning to teaching. Point being, everyone seemed to move on okay, with Four Rooms nothing more than a bizarre detour in each's career. To some extent, I do think the film is an interesting peak into the post-Pulp Fiction rockstar era for Tarantino and his chums, but it also captures the worst elements of the era. In any event, Four Rooms is most certainly best viewed as a curiosity because as art or entertainment, it's a pretty massive failure.

D

Haven't seen it.

I do wonder if I'd have tried to defend the movie had I seen it when I was a teenager and at the peak of my Tarantino worship.

I haven't seen King Arthur nor am I going to but I have some friends who absolutely love Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies. Again, I have no interest in ever seeing them but I would be lying if I said I wasn't at least mildly curious. Granted these friends don't necessarily have the most refined taste in cinema.

Someone take note for film club.


I recently watched king Arthur again like a week ago... It's so fire. From start to finish the montage world building is exquisite. Best Arthurian take hands down. Maybe Excalibur is better but it isn't as fun.

My ears are burning.

Good review.

My own opinion of Space Jam is gratitude for this gem:

Yoga Hosers



Wanted to watch this while it was still available to watch for free and I'm sort of glad I did. If I had paid money to watch Yoga Hosers I think I might have seriously fallen into a deep depression. I don't think it's overstating things to say Kevin Smith's horror-comedy of two Canadian quick-stop employees fighting hordes of tiny Nazi sausage men is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. The film is, in brief, painfully unfunny, visually ugly, and completely structureless. That last point is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Yoga Hosers. Say what you will about Tusk - a movie which, to be clear, also blows - but at least it told a coherent story with some sense of flow. With Yoga Hosers, every seen feels like its own isolated little skit that could be cut or moved with almost no consequence to the film. You can tell this movie's origins lie in stoners recording a podcast because this is similarly rambling, incohesive, and only funny to those who made the joke.

I also feel I have a patriotic duty to call out how much of the film's humour rests on lame jokes about how Canadia pronounces certain words, namely sorry ("soorree") and about ("aboot"). Smith clearly thinks this is hilarious, not only because he has one of those words uttered every 5 minutes or so, but the big gag of the opening are the main characters saying "soorree aboot that" over and over again. Always a good idea to run a joke firmly into the ground from the start and then continue to make it for the next 80 minutes. Then of course there's Johnny Depp returning as the French-Canadian detective from Tusk and the character is as horrid as I remembered. Like James Corden in Cats, Depp has the distinction of being the singular most annoying thing in a movie that is already wretched.

On the whole, what is there to really say about Yoga Hosers? It's astonishingly witless, painful to sit through, and frequently embarrassing for all parties involved, including and especially the viewer. And the thing that sticks out most is that the whole thing is made with such a "eh, fuck it" attitude that I'm not sure why anyone bothered. As for the cheap Canadian jokes and stereotypes, I can't say I was offended, but if my fellow countrymen would like to initiate some sort of defamation or class action lawsuit, I'm down.

F

In all honesty, though, this movie has long held a sort of morbid curiosity for me in terms of watching it...and I'm actually glad that I finally did. Because while this movie is in no way good or anything approaching it...it's certainly never boring, either. Nearly every single decision this movie makes is just plain bad or dumb, but to its credit, that helped ensure that it always held my attention. Not so much because I was invested even remotely in anything that was happening, but because I was fascinated to see what boneheaded decision this movie was going to make next. It goes without saying that Shaq is a charisma-less lead here, woefully out of his depth in trying to anchor a film, and even when he attempts to go for emotional moments, they come off incredibly half-hearted. You've also got Judd Nelson playing the main villain here, and if he or the filmmakers thought he would make for a menacing presence, well...joke's on them. As a superhero/comic book film overall, though, Steel just falls flat on its face and is as empty and hollow as the suit itself. It lacks any true excitement to the action scenes -- which feel as lumbering as Shaq himself probably felt in trying to walk around in the suit -- the plotting is pedestrian and uninspired, and its lead has all the charm of, well, a plate of steel.

Red Sonja is terrible by all accounts. I don't remember anything about it except that it sucks and makes Conan the Destroyer look like Conan the Barbarian in comparison.