The Disaster Artist [Book Review]

Here are a few facts about vanity filmmaker Tommy Wiseau:

He shot The Room on film and video using side-by-side cameras. Why? No one knows.
He built the infamous rooftop set in a parking lot despite having access to at least two real-life rooftops.
He built an alley set in a building which had a perfectly usable alley outside.
He’s mysteriously rich.
Whenever questioned about his bizarre creative decisions, he often replies, “No Mickey Mouse bullshit.”
He maintained a billboard of his face on Highland Avenue for five years at five grand a month.

When it was clear Hollywood wasn’t going to give him the role of a lifetime, Tommy Wiseau decided to take matters into his own hands. He wrote, directed, and produced The Room, which is today considered one of the greatest bad movies of all time. This thing has such a cult following that James Franco purchased the movie rights to The Disaster Artist, which will feature Franco himself as Wiseau, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Hannibal Buress, Kate Upton, Zac Efron, Alison Brie, Sharon Stone, and Bryan Cranston.

The Disaster Artist is a 2013 book by working actor Greg Sestero, The Room’s co-star. In the book, Sestero details the unlikely friendship he forged with Wiseau who was at least twenty years his senior (Wiseau’s exact age is unknown). It quickly becomes apparent the reclusive filmmaker is a deeply guarded person despite his dreams of megastar fame. Whenever he does open up about his past, the contradictory stories are unlikely at best. To this day people are still trying to piece together the clues about his origins. He’s like the Jack the Ripper of independent cinema, a guy who stormed out of obscurity and plunked down a ridiculous amount of cash to make himself a star.

Not only did The Room cost six million dollars to make, but Wiseau maintains homes in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, the latter of which he hadn’t visited in so long he couldn’t remember the code to the alarm system (1234, as it turns out). The story is mostly about Sestero—because there’s so much we’ll never know about Wiseau—and his own quest as a Hollywood hopeful. It’s at an acting class where he first meets Wiseau, who is last picked when the students are instructed to pair up. Sestero, at the time, thinks Wiseau’s madness is charming. Despite the protests of friends and family, who suspect Wiseau is either mafioso or possibly the Zodiac Killer, Sestero agrees to move out to LA with his new buddy.

When Wiseau meets Sestero’s concerned mother for the first time, as the men are headed out to LA, she warns Wiseau not to hurt her son. Sestero writes:

I put my hands over my eyes. The worst thing Tommy could do in response to this request, I thought, would be to chuckle creepily.

“I would not,” Tommy said, chuckling creepily.

The Disaster Artist is so funny at times my laughter woke my partner up even though she was in a separate room. Most readers will probably come to this book seeking the same answers I did, hoping for a shred of insight into Wiseau’s bizarre mind. Yet by the end of the book you won’t know much more about why Tommy Wiseau made the movie he did. If the book had shed light on these matters, The Room, and Wiseau himself, may have lost their allure.

I’m thrilled the story behind the scenes is as curious as the movie itself. There are a lot more questions than answers, which makes it all the more fun. The best answer you’re going to get? “No Mickey Mouse bullshit.” Ha ha ha, what a story, Greg.

Midnight Movie: A Cat in the Brain (1990)

“A lot of Italian genre directors are animal lovers. Mario Bava loved cats, Riccardo Freda loves horses, and Dario Argento loves himself.” — Lucio Fulci

Fade in: An aerial shot of a man, sitting at his desk, writing frantically. We hear him muttering like a lunatic. His scribbling pen can barely keep up with the ideas boiling out of him: “A throat torn out by a maddened cat… burned alive… buried alive… tortured… scalded…!” Meanwhile, the camera pushes in close to his head and the perspective enters his skull. There’s a cat in there, which munches on his brain like a vulture on roadkill.

Cut to: A cold body lying on a medical table. A section of the rump is missing. The body is then ripped apart by a chainsaw as the camera lingers.

Cut to: A man frying meat in a pan. He sits down in front of a television screen and cuts into his meal with a knife and fork. On the television, an actress seductively informs the viewer, “I love you so much I could eat you.” The man raises his fork and proclaims, “Just what I’m about to do!”

Lucio Fulci’s A Cat in the Brain (aka Nightmare Concerto) is gleeful insanity. This is Fulci’s version of 8 1/2, but instead of casting a movie star surrogate, Fulci casts himself in the lead role. Like many of Fulci’s movies, the camerawork and acting are dreamlike, but this time used to comedic effect. Meta-horror is often lame, especially when there are movies inside the movie (this time it’s stock footage from Fulci’s own films), but this one isn’t. It took me a while to get the joke—all of fifteen minutes. This isn’t Fulci ripping off Fellini; it’s Fulci making fun of Fellini as well as filmmaking in general. Being a horror director must be one of the strangest jobs in the world, which is especially apparent (and hilarious) when Fulci’s fictional shrink reviews some of his actual films.

Here are some of the things you’ll see in A Cat in the Brain: a Nazi using a woman’s vagina as a billiards pocket, a hilariously psychopathic psychiatrist, and a literal cat inside a man’s head. Fulci is one of the unlikeliest likable protagonists.

Green Room (2016)

You could argue Green Room is more thriller than horror, but bones are broken, throats are torn out, and faces are mauled. The camera rarely cuts away as the imagery shocks and awes. There’s no supernatural element—not that that’s a requisite for horror—but the skinheads here are effectively monsters because they’re depicted not as cannon fodder, but three-dimensional humans. The things that happen in Green Room are, to put it mildly, horrific. And if I were to make a list of the best movies of the twenty-first century, I’d rank it extremely high.

A wandering punk band is hard up for cash. They reluctantly end up taking a gig at a rundown neo-Nazi joint in the middle of nowhere. In true punk fashion, the band decides to rile up the crowd with a cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” That goes over about as well as you might expect. Fortunately, the rest of their set is played hard enough to win the skinheads over by the end. After the show, the band heads back to the green room and accidentally discover the venue’s operators are covering up the murder of a young woman.

While the skinheads scramble to come up with a plan, the band is locked in the green room with a psychopath. He subtly mentions his revolver only holds five cartridges, “because they’re so fucking big that’s all that can fit in the cylinder.” Meanwhile, the neo-Nazis outside the room call Darcy Banker, their leader and the owner of the property. Banker is played by Patrick Stewart, whose performance is neither too cold or too hot. He’s not a man who relishes his villainy. His only motivation is to get the witnesses off his property as quickly as possible so he can murder them elsewhere.

The simple plan complicates quickly. Banker, who’s always failing to keep the situation from escalating, comes up with one idea after another to flush the band members out of the green room. He approaches the problem matter-of-factly, as if coordinating the extermination of rodents. To him, it’s just another problem in the life of a businessman, albeit an amoral one. Another interesting choice is the skinheads aren’t caricatures; when Banker loses his cool and humiliates one of his men, he promptly apologizes for his transgression. His henchmen aren’t expendable in his mind, they’re family.

There’s no fantasy violence here. There are no characters who do unbelievably heroic or villainous things. The good guys are gonna take a licking. Some of the bad guys are gonna take a licking, too. We all hate movies in which stupidly written characters do stupid things, but here’s a rare example in which smartly written characters do stupid things. After all, they’re young, immature, and panicking in a realistic way.

New Year’s Evil (1980)

“Shhhh… I can hear your heart beating. I don’t like that.”

Roz Kelly (Pinky Tuscadero from Happy Days) plays Blaze Sullivan, the VJ-like host of a televised New Year’s Eve bash. During one of the show’s call-in segments, a modulated voice promises to kill someone very close to her. The police quickly discover it’s not just a prank call: someone’s already dead. The man responsible refers to himself as Evil and he intends to murder someone every hour, on the hour, as each timezone in the United States welcomes the new year.

As per Cannon Film Group’s philosophy, everything in New Year’s Evil has been cranked up to 11. This ensures even the mundane scenes are sensational as absolute anyone in the picture might be packing a switchblade. Right off the bat we see a group of punk rockers drinking and driving down a Hollywood street in a convertible that’s pushing capacity. The televised party they’re heading to hosts a gaggle of similar delinquents as one presumably real life band after another plays fantastic-shitty 80s music.

Meanwhile, the killer paroles mental institutions and bars for his victims. Remember: his plan is to kill someone every hour on the hour until the clock strikes twelve. He’s capable of getting an awful lot done between attacks, including: finding his victims, arranging their dead bodies for cinematic reveals, changing disguises, sneaking into guarded buildings, and calling into the TV show. At one point he even gets into a traffic accident with a biker gang that leads to a foot chase through a drive-in movie. Yet he still manages to get to his next appointment on time.

Unless you’ve never seen a movie in your life, you’ll figure out the twist ending: the killer is actually Blaze’s oft-mentioned but curiously missing-in-action husband. Even if the repeated “Where’s Dad?” line doesn’t clue you in, you’ll start to suspect it the moment their son pulls his mother’s pantyhose over his head and pierces his ear with a needle. Here’s the best part: during a wonderfully cheesy soliloquy he looks into the mirror and tells himself, “I think I have a mental disorder.”

Don’t worry: there’s yet another twist at the end which I won’t spoil. Unfortunately, you’ll see that one coming from a mile away, too. Oh well, it’s still a fun picture.

Midnight Movie: Deadly Friend (1986)

Paul, the teenage hero of Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend, not only designs advanced robots, but he teaches college courses, dissects human brains, and somehow finds the time to hang out with his friends. The robot he’s created, “BB,” looks like a robot from any other 80s movie. It can crack locks, shoot hoops, and move heavy furniture. The only thing his robot can’t do is dodge shotgun spray, which we learn when it ding-dong ditches the neighborhood crazy lady, played by Anne Ramsey from The Goonies and Throw Momma from the Train. Don’t you just love her?

Paul’s love interest (Kristy Swanson in her first leading role) is repeatedly abused by her alcoholic father. In one of the film’s three or four dream sequences, which are filmed Nightmare on Elm Street style, she stabs her dear old dad with a broken flower vase. What follows is a jarringly bloody scene. Jarring because watching Deadly Friend is like getting thirty minutes into Short Circuit before discovering it’s an R-rated horror movie.

And here’s where my objectiveness flies out the window. I love killer robot movies. Terminator, Runaway, Chopping Mall, Screamers… I can’t get enough of this shit. What’s disappointing about Deadly Friend is they dispense with the actual robot twenty minutes in. The movie then goes the Donovan’s Brain/Frankenstein route: after Swanson’s father accidentally kills her, Paul transplants BB’s brain to her body. As expected, the world’s first robo-girl doesn’t come in peace. How she got superhuman strength isn’t explained nor is it entirely important in a movie like this.

This is an 80s movie, through and through, no doubt conceived by coked-up movie executives who wanted a gorier E.T. The Extraterrestrial. I mention E.T. because that’s exactly what Deadly Friend’s plot structure seems to mimic. Genre movies back then simply moved at a different pace than they do now. While most “slow-burn” horror films bore, this one has a pleasant pace. It really takes its time, but never takes more than we’re willing to give it. It makes the absurd climax, which is cram-packed with unintentional laughs, all the more entertaining.

J.J. Abrams said he got the name for one of his The Force Awakens characters from Phantasm. I’m beginning to wonder if he lifted BB-8’s name from this movie.

Midnight Movie: The Vagrant (1992)

The Vagrant stars Bill Paxton, Michael Ironside, Marshall Bell, and Collen Camp. Killer cast, right? Unfortunately, each supporting character is compartmentalized. If you don’t see them interacting with the main character, you don’t see them interacting at all.

Paxton plays Graham Krakowski, which is pronounced “Crack-house-ski” by some characters. He has a stable yet mind-numbing job, which allows him to buy a fixer-upper from his nymphomaniacal real estate agent (Camp). Soon he’ll learn there’s a vagrant in the neighborhood (Bell) who’s squatting on a nearby lot. Krakowski takes out a second mortgage and fortifies the property with the best security money can buy, including a perimeter fence, stadium lights, and an automatic music player that makes intruders think someone’s at home when he’s away.

After spending every dime on this worthless stuff—worthless because it doesn’t stop the vagrant from letting himself into Krakowski’s house—he realizes he should have bought furniture instead of Pentagon-level security. So he has the inside of the house decorated at his girlfriend’s insistence and puts it all on his credit cards. Now that he’s ensured he’ll spend the rest of his life in debt, the vagrant’s antics drive him crazy, he loses his job, and an over-the-top homicide detective (Ironside) is trying to finger him for a murder the vagrant actually committed.

Did I mention this is supposed to be a comedy? I love horror-comedies, but this one isn’t scary and it isn’t very funny, either. The concept was ripe to become a cult classic and I’m a fan of all these actors. This is actually my second viewing and I was hoping I would notice satirical complexities I was too young to pick up on the first time around. Nope. It’s shallow and intentionally cheesy and pretty incompetent to boot.

The Vagrant isn’t a terrible movie, just mediocre, but it does entertain here and there.

Midnight Movie: Clown (2014)

I never thought clowns were scary, but I love seeing them in movies. It’s almost as if they were made for the screen. (For a recent example, see: Álex de la Iglesia’s The Last Circus.) Anyway, you remember that part in Parenthood in which Steve Martin has to dress up as a clown for his son’s birthday party? Imagine if he discovered the costume wouldn’t come off. Then, as his frustrations mounted, he developed urges to murder innocent children. That’s the premise behind Clown, a remarkably deadpan horror-comedy written by a couple of filmmakers who got Eli Roth to produce after they made a proof of concept trailer.

Kent McCoy, real estate agent, is stuck in an old clown costume he found. All attempts to take it off—which have involved hemostats, razor blades, and power tools—have only injured him. The costume is fusing to his body like reverse-molting. His skin turns white so he has to wear flesh-colored makeup to pass in public. Unfortunately, it’s clear he’ll never look normal again and his appearance is progressively devolving into something hideous.

While researching the origins of the costume, Kent contacts an expert played by Fargo’s Peter Stormare. Stormare’s character reveals the costume’s not made out of fabric at all, but it’s the hide of an ancient Icelandic demon. Ridiculous, right? Wisely, the film plays it with a straight face and never elbows you for a laugh, which is far funnier than a Sharknado-level farce. Getting trapped in a clown costume actually is a scary concept because it would be as embarrassing as accidentally showing up to school without pants on. Illogical, yes, but so are most nightmares.

The demon the skin belonged to was known for eating children, an urge which proves contagious to Kent. The filmmakers leverage that aspect of the plot into a moral quandary that comes into play towards the end of the movie. Without giving too much away, people often say they would do absolutely anything for their children. Clown explores the darker implications of an otherwise innocent statement like that.

While Clown’s promotional material suggests it might assault you with buckets of gore, it neither wants to push the envelope or shy away from the good stuff. It implies more than it shows, yet it makes sparing yet effective use of body horror. These guys sneak the crazy stuff into your blind spot and by the time it’s in your peripheral vision it’s too late.

I really liked this movie, which is bizarre and subtle at the same time. I was reminded of the shocking reveal at the end of Rosemary’s Baby, which is simultaneously the worst thing that could happen and somehow amusing. The acting is good and the characters seem real and grounded. They don’t even do anything especially stupid like make excuses for why they don’t call the police. I mean, if an Icelandic demon fused with your body, who you gonna call anyway?

If you ever wondered why I’m an Eli Roth fan, it’s because of his involvement in movies like this. We need more cheerleaders for the smaller voices in genre films. Roth’s enthusiasm is infectious.

Midnight Movie: Fortress of Amerikkka (1989)

John Waters once said, “Get more out of life. See a fucked-up movie.”

I’ve written about the purity of exploitation films many times. They promise a certain kind of entertainment—usually mindless—and they either deliver or they don’t. Here’s one that delivers, but once it crosses the line, it doesn’t stop. Early on, a defenseless old man gets drawn between a car and a tree in gruesome fashion. Soon after, a terrified child get shot in the back. Not that any of it looks real, mind you, but it’s still not for the faint of heart.

Fortress of Amerikkka has a lot in common with Surf Nazis Must Die. They both have sleazy titles, they both contain unbridled cheese, and they were both distributed by Troma Entertainment (of course). Surf Nazis Must Die is just a little more fun; any revenge film in which the hero is a motorcycle-driving black mama is clearly better than one in which a white actor (Gene LeBrock) plays a Native American named John Whitecloud.

Whitecloud has just been released from prison. The first thing he does is stock up on weapons and ammunition at the local gun store. There he has a run-in with the dirty cop who killed his brother and put him away in the first place. The cop tells Whitecloud he better watch his back, a scene every movie like this must include. Meanwhile, there’s a militia performing training exercises in the surrounding woods. The villain, who reminds me of Donald Trump making Amerikkka great again, commands his mindless followers to kill anyone who stumbles upon the location of their camp, which seems to be damn near everyone but the cops.

These are two very different plots which run parallel until, suddenly, they don’t. And here’s where the confusion comes into play: Why is America spelled with a triple-K? It leads you to believe the militia has ties with the Klan, yet they’re a racially inclusive and female friendly group, as far as I can tell. Troma films have been known for being as subtle as a cannonball, so I’m not sure what the social commentary is here, if any. I just can’t bring myself to believe the guy who directed two Class of Nuke’Em High sequels had anything more important to say than “violence and boobies, yay!”

The “that’s so wrong” factor of this movie is simply stunning. Get a bunch of drunk friends together and you’ll probably have a blast. It’s one of the wildest Troma films that wasn’t produced in-house.

Midnight Movies: The Toxic Avenger II & III

I originally saw the original The Toxic Avenger on USA Up All Night! when I was something like eight or nine years old. On my many repeat viewings of the worn VHS I recorded myself, I would laugh gleefully when, upon committing vehicular homicide, one of the evil punks announces he has to go to bed early “because I’ve gotta go to church.” Years later, at the beginning of Toxic Avenger Part IV, Stan Lee’s voiceover recounts the events of the first film before going on to say, “Then… two rotten sequels were made. Sorry about that!”

Curiously, I’ve watched the “rotten sequels” more than I saw the fourth movie. I actually prefer Toxie’s makeup and his John Candy-like demeanor in the two middle entries. The biggest problem with the back-to-back II & III is they were intended to be one film until director Lloyd Kaufman, realizing he had shot too much footage, had the idea to split the one movie into two. The problem is Kaufman overestimated just how much usable footage he had.

Following the events of the first film, Melvin the mop boy, aka Toxie, has successfully cleaned Tromaville of crime and pollution. He lives with his blind girlfriend Claire (even Kaufman has admitted he doesn’t know why they changed the character’s name from Sarah) and finds himself without purpose. So he sets off to Japan in search of his long lost father, only to find the man sets off his Spidey-Sense (uh, I mean “Tromatons”) because he is, in fact, an evil drug lord. Meanwhile, in Toxie’s absence, an evil corporation moves into Tromaville.

The good stuff is present, albeit smothered in the padding. Part II opens with a hilariously stupid fight before the promising pace trips on the overuse of voiceovers and the extended interlude in Japan. A lot of the footage that’s used in Toxic Avenger II is actually recycled in Toxic Avenger III, sometimes with replaced dialogue, sometimes unaltered, but always at the expense of fun. In other words, there’s a great Troma movie between the two pictures and if a skilled fan editor hasn’t made a singular supercut yet, I’d be very surprised.

When I was younger, I preferred Part II because I somehow liked the stuff in Japan. Now that I’m older, it’s clear the third film, The Last Temptation of Toxie, is the superior picture. The opening was obviously shot after Kaufman decided to split the film into two. The fight may not be as long and complex as the one which opened the previous movie, but its brevity helps solidify the pace and believe me: this movie can use all the help it can get.

Toxie’s relationship with Claire takes an unexpectedly cute turn. Toxie literally sells his soul to the devil to pay for the operation to restore her eyesight (and to get his mother a microwave oven). He does this knowing full well that once she can see, she may be repulsed by his hideously deformed nature. That’s our little Melvin—a selfless darling—and we can only hope the inevitable Hollywood remake will absorb the more subtle ingredients of the franchise rather than focusing solely on the exploitation stuff.

Nothing in these two films is half as wild (or gleefully politically incorrect) as the punks who squash a little boy’s head before beating an elderly woman to death. Nor is the dialogue ever quite as poetic as the thug who exclaims, “I’ve always wanted to cornhole me a blind bitch!” Unless you’re a completionist, or a die hard Troma fan, it’s probably acceptable to skip all the sequels. But there is some of that old magic here. It’s only in short bursts, few and far between.

Midnight Movie: Bloodsport (1988)

Bloodsport kind of has an identity crisis. It’s not so bad it’s good (cheesy montages and poor dubbing notwithstanding), but it’s almost good enough to be… well, good. It wasn’t Jean Claude Van Damme’s first movie, but it’s probably the one which put him on the map. Van Damme plays a U.S. Army Captain who goes AWOL to participate in the underground kumite (“koo-muh-tay”), a tournament in which thirty martial artists gather in Hong Kong to face off until there’s only one left. One character describes it as “cockfighting with humans.”

Along the way, he meets Donald Gibb (Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds) who provides so-so comic relief until the film’s villain smashes his skull in. At that point, the stakes have been raised and Van Damme’s character not only has to fight for his own honor, but for… oh, who cares? If you haven’t seen Bloodsport, all you want to know is: Is the fighting any good? Sort of. Sometimes Van Damme’s moves are so plodding, I wonder why the director employs slow motion at all.

There’s a curious lack of blood for a movie that has “Blood” right there in its title. Still, the film’s extremely watchable, I guess because it’s so rarely boring. Cannon was good at making cheap movies look expensive. Consider the fact this was made for around four million dollars, adjusted for inflation, and a modern studio wouldn’t get this kind of production value for anything less than fifty million or so.

The character Van Damme plays in Bloodsport was a real guy who was full of shit when he convinced the filmmakers to tell his story. That doesn’t matter at all.