Sometimes people like what they think is wrong. Drivers crane their necks to get a good look at an accident they wish would never have happened and millions buy tabloids and tune in to reality TV to see others at their worst. Still, people don’t purposefully burn their toast and ruin their eggs in the morning. People do, however, purposefully go and see movies believing they are objectively awful, and they enjoy themselves doing it. There is such a thing as a movie so bad it’s good, that succeeds because and not in spite of its shortcomings.
“Troll 2” (Claudio Fragasso, 1990) and “The Room” (Tommy Wisseau, 2003) are two laughably inept movies that have captured the hearts of many who go out of their way to view and ridicule them. “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans” (Werner Herzog, 2009) has all the trappings of an awful movie but under the visionary direction of legendary German filmmaker Herzog, the film self-consciously folds in on itself creating an origami swan out of a used Burger King wrapper.
“Troll 2” is a low budget fantasy horror film written and directed by the Italian Claudio Fragasso under the pseudonym Drake Floyd in 1990. Sometimes referred to as the “best worst movie” of all time, it spawned an award winning documentary about its origins and reception in 2009 made by the child actor star of the film, Michael Stephenson. The title was an afterthought attempting to grab the audience from the 1986 film “Troll.” “Troll 2” is actually about goblins, vegetarian goblins, and the magic they use to turn human flesh into plant matter suitable for consumption. It’s also fear propaganda setting the suburban nuclear family against a fusion of rural America and alternative values, with child torture and terrorism, and Stonehenge.
The film opens with a shameless rip from “The Princess Bride” (Rob Reiner, 1987) with Grandpa Seth telling Joshua a bedtime story from his rocking chair. We see a boy, Peter, walking through a foggy forest in a button-down shirt with a tie, vest, and robin hood hat. He meets a girl with Telemundo style fake freckles only to discover, too late to save himself, that she is an evil goblin. The only thing real here is the actors’ struggle for credibility as the goblins attack to ‘80s power pop. When is this, and where, and who is the boy, and what, pray tell, are those low-budget goblins? Things are made much weirder as a series of fetishizing extreme close-ups of grandpa’s mouth and beard fade in on top of the scene. The soundtrack from the forest is cut, but rather than converse normally, Peter and the woman pantomime speech and nod frantically at each other, as if they were cognizant of grandpa’s narration and their need to keep quiet. Is this a television reenactment, or a fantasy horror film?
When the big reveal comes, a shot of Peter’s face cuts to Grandpa’s, and then again to Joshua, bolting up in bed and bringing his face into the same position in the frame. Seth insists the story is true and goblins will probably eat Joshua. This intense graphic match of the three faces is a technique used heavily by Eisenstein, and made famous in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) as the bone transforming into the space station. It’s a good technique that can connect scenes or objects together and lessen the shock of a hard cut. But after the incomprehensible first couple of minutes, no audience is ready to follow this film as it explores the possibilities of cinema. It’s laughable that the director would try to integrate this and other serious techniques into such a bad movie. If the whole film were stationary medium-long shots of actors reading lines it would be a boring, perhaps equally bad movie. Such mediocrity abounds in various forms. It’s through trying for greatness and failing that something can become entertaining because of, and not in spite of, it’s inferiority.
The next character introduced is mom, and she is as intense as she is batty. Her eyes bulge as she laboriously explains that Seth has been dead for six months and Joshua was at the funeral. She actually refers to herself as “me, his daughter.” This is expository dialogue taken to a whole new level, because it calls out its own inadequacy. People don’t talk like that, ever. The dialogue is made even worse when characters mix idioms into their speech. Much later, the goblin queen instructs her horde to eat (after they have already started) by asking them to, “make yourselves comfortable,” as if they were reclining on a sofa and not gorging themselves on a transfigured maiden. The actors complained that they were made to read the lines as written, though Fragasso’s English leaves much to be desired. As he wrote and directed the film, the language barrier must have been a constant struggle.
Even lines that don’t butcher the English language carry their own special what-the-heck quality. When the sister Holly finds her potential boyfriend Elliot in her room, she tells him her family hates him because he spends too much time with his male friends. “My father will cut off your liiiiiiiitle nuts and eat them,” she explains, complete with hand gestures to illuminate the concept. Not two minutes later, Elliot asks if he can accompany the family on their month long farming trip to the rural town of Nilgob, to which Holly excitedly agrees, promising to tell daddy about it later. All this after an insane montage of heart shaped wallpaper, cats, stuffed animals, and Holly doing bench presses.
The movie is rife with inconsistencies like this, which carry more gravity than simple errors. The mom, who is like a drill sergeant forcing her family to sing songs in the car, makes a habit of interrupting people. Only the film treats the interruption like any other line of dialogue. The kids stop talking, the camera cuts to mom’s red face, and she takes a deep breath before saying, “Stop!” To be remotely realistic the kids should continue talking into her breath, and the cut should come in the middle of the word “stop.”
Realism means something different in a fantasy horror movie. If handled correctly, people can accept dead grandpas, goblins (though maybe not vegetarian goblins), druid magic and whatever else. The strangest part of the film doesn’t involve sweating green chlorophyll, or a love scene with popping corn—it’s the alien otherness that permeates every line of dialogue, every action and every frame. Actually, it’s when dead Grandpa Seth gives young Joshua a Molotov cocktail and instructs him to firebomb the house where the goblins are having a party for his family. Fragasso’s vision doesn’t line up with what we know about life on any level. He pits the suburban nuclear family against rural farming communities (the goblins can take human form) with an isolationist zeal of staunch conservatism. We would expect the farmers to share in that conservative sentiment, but they are instead made vegetarians, and pagans, hallmarks of the leftist counter-culture.
American social norms are violated at every turn, often with unintentional homoerotic overtones. Every actor appears to be taken from a different movie with a different style. Forget complicated concepts like motivation and back story, these characters aren’t even believable forms of sentient life. When the family isn’t under reacting to a creepy preacher manhandling Joshua, they are overreacting to the nonsensical sub plot of the boyfriend. It’s a wonder that anyone depicted in this film manages to dress themselves in the morning. Basic social interacts challenge them to their core. They are like androids with defective software.
With nothing to relate to, audiences are free to revel in the exquisite absurdity of a world in which a bologna sandwich is an ultimate weapon. Simple non-sequitors abound for an appreciative audience with nothing left to lose. This is where awesomely bad movies intersect with cult favorites like “Rocky Horror Picture Show” (Jim Sharman, 1975). The mom is psycho, the dad is a jerk, the sister is a slut and Joshua is incessantly tortured by the adults around him. One of Elliot’s friends, Arnold, is particularly popular on Youtube where clips of him yelling “OH MY GODDDDDD!” have over two million views. There’s more insanity in “Troll 2” than could be fit into 10,000 words. It’s up to audiences to forge their own entertainment from the fractured film, to talk back to the screen. Watching this terrible movie can itself become a creative act. And that’s one way “Troll 2” has an edge on a lot of good movies with static narratives.
Newer than “Troll 2” and no more comprehensible, “The Room” is the creative vision of mysterious writer, director, producer and lead actor Tommy Wiseau. Though now rebranded as a black comedy, “The Room” was originally meant to be a serious drama. More accurately it’s a narcissistic opus to Wiseau’s own child-like ignorance. Wiseau plays Johnny, a wealthy banker engaged to Lisa, an insane harpy who seduces his best friend Mark and drives Johnny to suicide. It’s questionable to even call this a movie—you can count the meaningful actions on one hand, and the rest is definitively the worst dialogue in cinema history. It’s more like a video of soft-core porn actors reading from the self-indulgent script of a middle-school Transylvanian foreign exchange student.
Everything about the film screams low-budget, but insanely, Wiseau spent an estimated $6 million on production and marketing with no known financial support. He shot the film on both 35mm and 720HD digital video, though only 35mm was used. In my interview with him for the Columbia Chronicle Wiseau says this is “because you see with 35mm you have a better depth of field,” though the vast majority of the shots take place in small rooms and the exterior roof uses a green screen. The superfluous b-roll of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge oft injected between scenes might be an example of this depth of field, however more often scenes are simply out of focus. Separate film crews were used for 35mm and for HD, and Wiseau replaced the crew twice because he felt they were altering his vision. He also replaced many actors who either quit or were fired in the middle of shooting.
As if he were a great auteur, Wiseau has a cult of ironic worshippers including many alternative comics like David Cross and Patton Oswalt who became enchanted by billboards of Wiseau’s face advertising the premiere in L.A. Without any kind of distribution deal, Wiseau rented a theater to show the film the required two weeks to submit it for the Academy Awards where it was completely ignored. Wiseau is by no means incidental to the success of “The Room.” His character, Johnny, is how Tommy Wiseau wishes the world would perceive him. Ham-fisted messages from Johnny like “if a lot of people love each other the world would be a better place” directly mirror Wiseau’s advice from my interview, “If a lot of people love each other the world would be a better place to live.”
In the film Johnny works diligently but is never rewarded. He saves his company money, showers his “future wife” (the word fiancé is never used) with gifts and roses, virtually adopts and pays for the aging orphan (somewhere around highschool, though the actor appears to be well into his 20’s) Denny’s apartment (which we never see) while he finishes school and constantly doles out advice to those around him. All of these things are established by his words alone and carry no emotional weight whatsoever.
The plot of the film doesn’t follow the love triangle romance as much as Johnny’s victimization and martyrdom. When Johnny asks “Why is this happening?” before eating a bullet, audiences might shed a tear only as a result of excessive laughter. The last moments of the film play out like an attention seeking suicidal teen’s misguided fantasy as Lisa, Mark and Denny discover his corpse and weep over their loss. The scene is made complete when Mark renounces Lisa and Denny chastises them both as voice-over phone calls to the police blatantly rip off the prayer montage from “It’s a Wonderful Life” (Frank Capra, 1946). It’s as if Wiseau fantasized about an outpouring reaction to his own death but his raging narcissism prevented him from acting on that impulse except in a fictional movie. This childish world view is confirmed by Wiseau’s subsequent 2004 short documentary, “Homeless in America,” which he felt compelled to make after discovering that some people did not have houses, and doesn’t go much deeper than that.
While the characters in “Troll 2” were anything but consistent, in “The Room” they are downright deceptive. In the first scene Johnny comes home and greets Lisa with a hearty “Hi babe” and a present, a sexy red dress, which she tries on. Denny enters and fails to take a hint when Johnny says he’s going upstairs to take a nap and Lisa says she’ll join him. The innuendo and knowing laughs seal it; they are going to have sex. The couple reaches the bed but instead of disrobing, Johnny hits Lisa with a pillow. You don’t leave company in the middle of a conversation, hot and bothered, to go have a pillow fight. There are no mixed messages, everything up until this point guarantees their copulation. Instead, they play with Denny before telling him “three’s a crowd” and then dance to bad R & B in the dark. Eventually they make it to the bed again and start to undress before standing on the bed and continuing their slow dance. What follows is an equally hysterical and uncomfortable love scene that they re-cut for use again later on.
Wiseau plays himself up like Fabio with roses, candles, trickling water, and his long greasy black hair and grossly muscular aging body. Their later love scene takes place to even worse music while Johnny is blackout drunk, so there’s no way he could have reproduced the same grandiose set-up. There is some topless nudity, but mostly shots of Johnny’s backside as he uncomfortably ungulates on top of Lisa like some type of burrowing worm on steroids.
At one point, an anonymous couple enters the empty titular room and begins a corny love-making scene in basic cable soft-core style. They feed each other chocolates while carrying on the innuendo for far too long before beginning to disrobe, ultimately fading out as the woman’s head falls below frame and the man makes the most obnoxious facial expressions outside of Jerry O’Connell in “Kangaroo Jack” (David McNally, 2003). In the next scene the couple scrambles to put on their clothes as Lisa enters with her mom who demands to know, “What are these characters doing here?” Lisa laughs and replies, “This is Michelle’s boyfriend, Mike.” Alright, fair enough, just one thing, who the heck is Michelle?
Lisa knows about the arrangement but covers, telling her mom they come over to do homework. Later when Mike tells Johnny about how the mom pulled “me underwears” out from his back pocket where he had hidden them during his exit, he refers to his activity as “making out.” That can’t be right. People do not sneak into other people’s homes for kinky dangerous making out. They do not take off their underwear for making out. They do not refer to making out as “doing homework” and no one’s head should be in their partner’s crotch for making out. There are two competing narratives here that no one, not even the characters, can sort out.
It often seems like the audience should be ignoring either the performances, or the dialogue. Other times the character’s themselves ignore each other’s speech. Johnny comes home one day looking distraught. Lisa asks if he got his promotion, to which he replies, “nah.” “You didn’t get it…did you” responds Lisa. But Johnny is equally ignorant. He overhears a conversation where Lisa admits her infidelity, and then declares “I show them, I will record everything!” and bugs the phone. He later gets in a fight with Mark at his birthday party over Lisa, and then overhears a phone conversation between Lisa and Mark while he has locked himself in the bathroom. But somehow not satisfied or not getting it, Johnny gets the tape and subjects the audience to a second listen before going Hulk and smashing the room. Lisa leaves, and Johnny rubs her red dress on his crotch while we see flashbacks of their sex scene. He groans loudly then holds the dress to his face and smells it. He grabs a random box from out of frame containing the duex ex machine in handgun form and the rest is history. This film raises thousands of questions and answers none. It’s a miracle it didn’t accidentally make more sense.
“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans” is one of many movies directed by mythic German filmmaker Werner Herzog that tells the tale of a central strong-willed protagonist who teeters over the brink of madness like in “Aguirre the Wrath of God” (Herzog, 1972), “Fitzcaraldo” (Herzog, 1982) and “Grizzly Man” (Herzog, 2005). It is, however, the only film that Herzog directed but did not write. Bill Finkelstein adapted the screenplay from the original “Bad Lieutenant” (Abel Ferrera, 1992) about a corrupt cop addicted to sex, drugs and gambling, dropped the catholic symbolism and set it in post-Katrina New Orleans. The superfluously long title betrays Finkelsteins background in television cop dramas like NBC’s “Law and Order.” He used that experience to write a formulaic bad cop movie like we’ve seen a thousand times. But under Herzog’s direction, the end product is in a category all its own.
Nicolas Cage stars as Terrance who is originally a Sergeant before he saves a lost prisoner stuck in a flooded jail cell directly after Katrina. In addition to his promotion to Lieutenant, Terrance receives a permanent, gargoyle-posture inducing back injury and a lifetime supply of vicodin to help with the pain. As in the original, Terrance maintains a balance of alertness and numbness between his cocaine, heroin, pot and crack habits, but here we are left to wonder how much is pain and how much addiction. He is both corrupt and effective, the former aiding and limiting the latter to come out roughly even.
The main plot follows the criminal investigation of a murdered Senegalese illegal immigrant family, the father of which was “selling heroin to supplement his income as a peddler.” Terrance leads the investigation and soon enough learns who the culprit is, but has to navigate some dangerous territory to get him before a jury. Everything is trite and squared away making it a minor offense to set such a superficial film on such serious backdrops and class, race, Hurricane Katrina, violence against women, immigration and crime. None of these issues are discussed openly; the script is restricted to in the moment, motive-driven dialogue while the rest of the plot is conveyed in the action. Then, Herzog adds superfluous supplementary artistry to the mix. In one scene we gaze in rapture at a pair of iguanas on a desk before a criminal bust while in another an alligator mourns its mate, the victim of a highway accident. In perhaps the best of these departures from the script, Terrence, all coked up and cracked out, demands his lackeys “shoot him again, his soul is still dancing.” The harmonica folk song “Old Lost John” by Sonny Terry plays over this exuberant, manic and mesmerizing scene just as it did for Herzog in the much talked about conclusion of “Stroszek” (Herzog, 1977), a film Ian Curtis watched before committing suicide.
These and other creative asides clash with the literal plot to an effect as confounding as in “Troll 2” or “The Room.” On one level, it can be enjoyed as purely absurd and laughed at in much the same way as those movies. Still, “Bad Lieutenant” has two things those films don’t that make us more generous and understanding. It’s a Hollywood film (Herzog’s only though he has directed other films in the U.S.) so it has production values and movie stars and Herzog is a world-renowned auteur. The film rewards faithful viewers with subtle deeper meanings.
Through all of his skill, Herzog interjects into the film his commentary and critique of the derivative, uninspiring material while bolstering it with a careful handling and exploration of the meager source material. More surprising than Herzog’s departures from the script is how much of the original remained. Rather than produce literal inconsistencies between the audio and visual tracks as in “The Room,” Herzog accepts the basic plot but produces auxiliary and competing elements through his interpretation. Despite the plethora of clichés, the story structure under Herzog remains unfettered by convention. It has what at times appear to be characteristic climbs and falls, but they are treated with little consideration. The major conflicts and plot lines are all familiar, but strange and unexpected things happen upon the way to disrupt the continuity of effect on the audience. Tension builds between the script and the direction and is relieved in brilliantly self-aware laughter inducing scenes. Maybe the best of these is the carnival of good things where after hitting rock bottom, Terrance finds all his problems dissolve before him in a matter of seconds with smiling faces and sunshine.
And there are many deeper meanings within the film. Terrance’s character is a bit of an enigma like Lisa or Holly, but his psychological makeup is the central question of the film, not merely a hilarious oversight. His complex and manic character can in some ways be defined by the roles he fulfills for his love interest, the high-class prostitute Frankie, played by Eva Mendez. At different times he can be her boyfriend, her John, the boy toy to her sugar momma, her pimp, a cop, her unfaithful boyfriend, her drug pusher, her breadwinner and ultimately, her husband. Terrance is further explored through his foil, the murderer drug lord he is tracking, Big Fate played by Xzibit. Big Fate is automatically assumed to be a bad guy, it’s in his job/character description. But the first time we meet him he has turned himself in, and in every scene he is good mannered, cheerful and in general a joy to behold. He even delivers justice to Jewish mobsters unfairly perusing Terrance for money. He is much more likable than Terrance who at first glance would appear good, a rank police officer fighting crime, but is so totally corrupt that he almost becomes an antihero.
This Bizarro World reversal is as funny as the vegetarian cannibal goblins in “Troll 2.” But there is even a third flip of the coin, as within Fate’s good core is bad seed and within Terrance’s bad nut rests a grain of decency and humanity. Though a magnanimous individual, Fate is still the murderer of a family with children and multiple innocent witnesses, yet the film does little to tie him emotionally to his crimes. In one scene after Terrance has teamed with Fate to make money to pay his gambling and Jewish mob related debts, Fate’s henchmen unload a body bag into the river while their boss pitches Terrance to be the front man for a legitimate business operation buying and flipping devastated Katrina property. And Terrance, though corrupt, shows respect where others do not, to his alcoholic father and step-mother, to his prostitute girlfriend, to immigrants and criminals. He attends the funeral of the murdered family and encounters a hysterical immigrant woman but somehow turns her insane ranting into his next lead. That’s something his partner Stevie played by Val Kilmer would never be able to do. The film ends with Terrance reunited with the prisoner whose life he saved, a drug offender, later sent to counseling and now a year sober.
“Bad Lieutenant” does the same thing as “Troll 2” and “The Room,” it succeeds because of its shortcomings. Yet under Herzog’s direction the film internalizes the commentary the audience generates for the awful movies. The ironic work is already a part of the film text making it a brilliant deconstruction of the genre. It is in essence a cult film in a can, prepackaged and ready for consumption. It was never difficult, though, for audiences to find ways to latch on to awful movies. The main difference is that “Bad Lieutenant” does not fail. It successfully combines the high-minded techniques of the cinematically obsessed with the absurdity and anachronism of the so-bad-it’s-good genre as only a great artist could.
