Nothing can prepare you for the brilliant awfulness of The Room. Critics’ comments such as “the worst film ever made” or “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” still fail to convey the joyful combination of earnestness and incompetence in a film that has become a cult phenomenon in America and is now working its magic on the UK. As one adoring fan puts it: “There is something so magically wrong with this movie that it can only be the product of divine intervention.”

A drama about a love triangle between Johnny, a kindly but “boring” banker, his manipulative fiancée Lisa and his best friend Mark, the film has been drawing hundreds of devotees to its midnight screenings in Los Angeles for seven years. Not only do such fans, who include members of Hollywood’s comedy frat pack such as Paul Rudd (Knocked Up, Friends), know every line (the anguished “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa” is a favourite) but screenings have become an interactive affair, à la Rocky Horror Picture Show, with the throwing of plastic spoons whenever a spoon image appears on screen, and fans arriving dressed in character. In July the film had its first British outing at the Prince Charles cinema in London. Its monthly screenings now sell out.

The man behind it all is the inscrutable Tommy Wiseau, the film’s director (and script-writer, lead actor and producer), a man with a thick Eastern European accent and a pale, muscular body that gets more than its fair share of screentime in excruciatingly corny sex scenes. Wiseau has surrounded himself with a thick layer of intrigue: he refuses to say where he is from, insisting that he is American. He also refuses to discuss finance: although he claims that the film cost $6 million (£3.7 million) to make he will not say where the funding came from, or disclose how much money it has made, although he admits it is “better than expected”.

Harry Medved, the co-author of books such as The 50 Worst Movies of All Time, believes that Wiseau’s insistence that he always intended the film to be “a quirky black comedy”, is simply good marketing. “He has been very clever. He knows that people think the film is bad but he’s playing to the crowd.”

Medved, who is credited with christening Ed Wood’s famous Plan 9 from Outer Space “the worst movie of all time”, adds that Wiseau’s film is so likeable because it was made with such sincerity. “Wiseau is like a modern-day Ed Wood — he’s a dreamer. In the Fifties and Sixties there was a lot of strained seriousness that produced wonderfully awful films. Then in the Eighties a camp aesthetic took hold when people realised they could harness moviegoers’ love of bad drama and suddenly they were all doing it with a wink and a smile. It doesn’t work as well when it’s intentional. Take Snakes on a Plane, for example. That’s just a very dull movie.”

There are very few truly great bad films, Medved adds, although science fiction and horror still tend to produce a few, such as Troll 2. Accidental hits such as The Room or Plan 9 can be lucrative, according to Medved, so long as they have the oxygen of publicity. When he and his brother Michael extolled a small 1978 horror called Attack of the Killer Tomatoes as “the worst vegetable movie ever made”, it became so popular that its director made three sequels and a TV series.

The Room is Wiseau’s first feature. He is now working on a vampire film and a sitcom called The Neighbours. British TV executives have shown interest in the latter, he claims.

Those who know Wiseau agree that he is an incredibly nice guy. Juliette Danielle, who plays Lisa, the treacherous fiancée in The Room, says: “He certainly has vision and knows what he wants. Of course we could see that there were a lot of unrelated plot elements, often awkward dialogue and random events, but Tommy was very clear that he didn’t want anything changed.”

As with any cult hit, The Room has spawned fan sites and parodies. In the absence of an official sequel, a fan has created The Room 2: Even Roomier, a ten-minute skit on YouTube, where, unusually, the acting is better than in the original. There are no plans to make an official sequel.

Whatever his delusions, Wiseau has achieved recognition only dreamt of by most Hollwyood newbies. “For me, to be a director, it is to provoke the audience,” he says. “They are the ones I must please.” And there at least Wiseau has it spot-on.

The next UK screening of The Room is at the Prince Charles Cinema, WC2 (0870 8112559), on Nov 28 (theroommovie.com)

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