10 Essential Trash Films You Need To Watch

The Ed Wood of the YouTube generation, Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed, produced and appears in The Room, playing a bizarrely accented character who despite looking like a genetic experiment that sampled DNA from Willem Dafoe and a lizard turns out to be the film’s romantic lead. Over the course of 99 unintentionally hilarious minutes, this unappealing lothario will be betrayed by his fiancé and best friend before committing suicide.

That’s it – that’s the film’s entire plot. But it doesn’t do justice to Wiseau, the only thespian in history to bring down the house with the line, “Hi, Mark.” Whether delivering soap opera dialogue in his impenetrable East European accent or constantly chuckling apropos of nothing (even while describing a woman being beaten), he is a magnetic screen presence for all the wrong reasons.

According to Variety, viewers who watched the film on its initial release were asking for a refund thirty minutes later, but when word spread that it was “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”, the movie became an underground phenomenon and inspired actor Greg Sistero to document the experience in his memoir The Disaster Artist. James Franco plays Wiseau in The Masterpiece, the film adaptation of Sistero’s book due for release later this year.