Roald Dahl Film Adaptations: Ranked From Worst To Best

9. Four Rooms

The only time any of Dahl's more adult works have been used in a feature length movie was as part of this disastrous mid-90s vanity project. An anthology conceived as a vehicle for then young turks of indie filmmaking Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Roxwell (a group that it's fair to say have enjoyed differing level success since), Four Rooms saw Tim Roth in an over the top performance as a hotel bellboy in four loosely linked narratives set in the eponymous rooms. Tarantino's episode, inspired by Dahl's The Man From the South, was preposterously self-indulgent even by the Kill Bill director's usual standards. In this segment Tarantino cast himself (never a good sign) as a famous film director who pushes his friend to recreate the finger chopping bet from Dahl's story, inspired by the episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that adapted it. Already two steps removed from the original story, to the extent that Dahl gets a "thanks" in the credits rather than a "story by", the segment is far more about Tarantino doing his thing than the original author. In itself that might not be an entirely bad thing (as we'll see Tarantino would not be the last auteur-ish director to subsume Dahl's style with his own), but Four Rooms largely feels like a joke that only QT himself finds funny. Fans of the story are hardly bereft of screen adaptations, however, with the original Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode remade for the show's 1980s update, the story used for an episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, and loosely inspiring a segment of Hong Kong-Korean-Japanese horror anthology Three... Extremes.