The Disappointments Room
It commits what’s arguably the worst sin a movie can commit: it’s dreadfully boring.
Jane Eyre and victorian-era upper-class “appearances matter” and the hiding away of the mentally unwell in secret chambers called “Disappointment Rooms” which are basements, attics or otherwise hidden rooms where families kept embarrassing family members out of view, either due to disabilities or mental afflictions. Not a bad concept… so what the actual fuck happened?
Since I cannot think of anything terribly original to say about this derivative, plodding and ultimately nonsensical mess of a “horror film” – I guess this qualifies as a horror film if Lifetime movies started a horror label (Deathtime movies?). Anyhow, since I have nothing to say beyond “I like Kate Beckinsale more as a brunette” I’m going to go ahead and let a couple excellent capsule Letter box reviews do the talking:
Roman said “One of the most inept, illigocial pieces of shit I’ve ever seen. A sure contender for worst of the year.”
Ruslan stated: “Shockingly inept, bland and nonsensical. The Disappointments Room recycles every cliche from the horror movie genre in its brief and miserable 76 minutes.”
Alex wrote: “This could have been decent had anything actually happened”
And in my favorite review, perhaps of any movie ever in the history of all movie reviews, Letterbox user StankShadow writes “If this movie was a smell, it would be asparagus piss.”
With all of that stated, is it any mystery AT ALL why I gave you this flaming dumpster of a flick to you?
A Fantastic factoid about this movie. It grossed $1.4 million in its opening weekend, going against that Clint Eastwood movie “Sully” starring Tom Hanks as the guy who landed the plane in the Hudson River. It placed 17th at the box office, so… not great. Then, in its second weekend, while still playing in over 1,500 cinemas, it made just $377,000, landing at 24th place. But oh! Week 3? It dropped from all but 36 cinemas nationwide, which set a record for the highest percentage of theaters dropping a movie in week 3 of wide release. And honestly, that’s probably the most interesting thing about this movie.
The movie came from Relativity Media which had just prior filed for bankruptcy, and as a result, it got bounced around schedule-wise, set to originally release in March 25, 2016, then bounced to August and next to November, only to suddenly be shifted to September. So maybe that’s partly why it performed so poorly at the box-office, but having seen it… I think we can agree it wouldn’t matter when this thing was released: it was gonna hit like turd to toilet.
It’s probably worth noting that DJ Caruso never quite recovered from this movie tanking. He was given the third movie in the “XXX” franchise before the release of “The Disappointments Room,” but despite “The Return of Xander Cage” making a good chunk of cash, the damage was already done. The next two movies he would make were both released in 2022: “Redeeming Love,” described as a Christian western romance film and “Shut In”, the third film to be released on “The Daily Wire’s” streaming platform. Yes, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, the one that’s currently planning a, exclsuive, series re-adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” Say no more.
Bottom Five Rooms:
5.) Aliens (1986)
The Queen’s Lair – Dir. James Cameron
Who knows what this was originally? I think it was the heat generators for the Hadley’s Hope colony set up on LV-426, but regardless, when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley walks into the nest of the Alien Queen in James Cameron’s masterpiece, the first thing any view likely does is breath out a very long “Ohhhhhhhh shit.” Doesn’t matter the age or the maturity level. Just one big “Ohhhhhh shit.” And whereas almost anyone in their right mind would have turned tail and gotten out of there as quick as humanly (or xenomorphably) possible when seeing that enormous Queen for the first time, never mind all those damn eggs full of facehuggers, but Ripley? She takes a few steps back and after eyeing an egg that opens, cocks her head to one side and, in an ultimate fuck you for all times, starts letting loose with the flame thrower, pulse rifle and grenade gun. Good lord. If you’ve not seen or revisited “Aliens” in a while, you really should. Jesus, it’s a fantastic flick.
4.) The Shining (1980)
Room 237 — Dir. Stanley Kubrick
This is about as obvious as it gets when compiling this list, and I’m a little ashamed to go THIS literal with things, but when you said you’re not going to do any haunted houses, I had to leap at the chance. Because at the end of the day, there are not many rooms more terrifying or threatening than Room 237 in Kubrick’s “The Shining.” There were a lot of scenes in this movie that freaked me out as a kid – the goddamn last shot of a frozen Jack Nicholson still gets me to this day – but oh man, when Jack walks into that spooky room EVER. SO. SLOWLY. – a room we have been warned about OVER AND OVER again and which Danny apparently came out mangled from, well, it’s a real pulse-pounding moment. Think about how it’s all composed, both shot-wise and in editing. How we’re led into the room first by Scatman Corother’s Dick Halloran’s reaction, shot in intense close-up. And then we see first-hand, again, the door slightly ajar with the key in it. And that’s intercut with Danny’s drooling seizure to what’s being seen. And next we glide into the room in a POV, surveying the whole place until settling on ANOTHER cracked-open door, this one to that green bathroom. And now our hand reaches in and it’s Jack’s hand and it’s clear SOMEONE IS IN THE BATHROOM because we see a shape behind the sheer shower curtain. And finally, it’s Jack – scared and swallowing his terror. Then A HAND reaches and pulls back the curtain to reveal a gorgeous nude woman WHO SHOULD NOT BE THERE. And now we’re like Jack, confused but maybe into it. So we move in and let this lovely naked lady get out of the tub. And, well, we all know what happens next. But I think from a pure filmmaking standpoint, there’s no room that quite “gets” viewers the way Room 237 does. To be perfectly honest, and to employ a way too overused term, it’s ICONIC and thus has to be included on this list.
3.) Species (1995)
Traincar – Dir. Roger Donaldson.
A definite contender for a future episode of Filmjitsu, this one is probably remembered to be better than it actually is. The performances are hilarious, with Michael Madsen somehow being the leading man in a cast that includes Forrest Whitaker, Ben Kingsley and Alfred Molina. Most people recall this flick because Natasha Henstridge is nude for a large portion of the running time, basically challenging Mathilda May in “Lifeforce” for the crown of most eye-catching alien in movie-history. But when I said “Bottom Five Rooms,” the very first thing I thought of was a scene from this movie in which our intrepid heroes enter a train car – I thought it was a hotel room, my bad – and there’s a dead body covered in blood, slime and other grizzly detritus. And in one of THE funniest lines in cinema history, Forrest Whitaker’s psychic character walks into the car, looks around and simply states “something bad happened here.” To be fair, there are numerous instances of Whitaker’s character doing this, but it’s all played miraculously straight. And in the train car, somehow Madsen and Kingsley don’t react to Whitaker at all, but 21 year-old me in the cinema BURST out laughing. And to this day, I remember Molina looking about the room – a truly horrific scene of death, gore and what looks like poop – while very obviously suppressing a gag. But even better? Madsen ends the scene by tossing a piece of evidence aside and stating bluntly “It stinks in here. I’m going outside.”
2.) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
The Flamingo Las Vegas room. – Dir. Terry Gilliam
As if whatever Johnny Depp’s Dr. Gonzo and Beniciio Del Toro’s Raoul Duke did to their first hotel room in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 fever dream wasn’t bad enough, well, Gonzo says it best himself: “There was a certain bent appeal to running a savage burn in one Las Vegas hotel and then just wheeling across town and checking into another.” And oh man, do they ever run a SAVAGE. BURN. While it’s bad enough that Gonzo arrives at their room in The Flamingo and discovers Duke “locked in some kind of preternatural courtship” with Christina Ricci’s vulnerable and way too young Lucy, who is tripping on acid, things get way worse when Gonzo wakes up the following morning – after an unimaginable late-night bender – to a room thoroughly trashed and wades through ankle-deep backed-up toilet water to survey the damage, describing the “general back ally ambience of the suite” as “so rotten. So incredibly foul. All these signs of violence. There was evidence, in this room, of excessive consumption of almost every type of drug known to civilized man since 1544 A.D. It was too savage. Too aggressive.” Whether it’s the crude pornographic photos smeared with mustard hardened to a yellow crust, the puddles of glazed ketchup on the bureau, the chaotic writing on the walls, in what looks like blood, that read “He Lives” and “Viva la Rana” or the smoking chasm in the center of the bed, this room is a nightmare of horrific overindulgence and definitely one of the unseemliest places cinema has ever realized. And that it’s essentially based on the true story catalogued by the great, maniacal Hunter S. Thompson in his book of the same name only stands to make it all the more terrifying. Also, a close runner-up for this list also from this movie, which honestly could have occupied every space on this list, is the scene in the North Star Cafe with Ellen Barkin. Harrowing and terrible, we view the truly monstrous nature of Raoul Duke when he threatens a late-night waitress with a knife at a nearly empty diner. The performances here are so on point that the viewer breaks out in a sympathetic sweat as the scene plays through it’s seedy ugliness. Gilliam reaches moments of crass genius in this film several times, but here he offered a dark and unsettling break in the proceedings, revealing contempt for his protagonists that lasts longer than the perilous joy of the rest of the film.
1.) Triangle of Sadness (2022)
The Dining Room – Dir. Ruben Östlund
Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s pitch black comedy, and English language debut, is a garish, merciless skewering of the rich, and no scene is more representative of the director’s relentless approach than the cruise-ship dining room scene which takes Monty Python’s Mr. Creasole character from “Meaning of Life” and multiplies the vomit by a factor of 100. While not everything happens in the dining room – the worst of it happens in bathrooms to people who don’t know which end their frighteningly avant-garde seafood delicacies are going to come out of – but man, the dining room, which rocks drastically side to side during a storm that alone would cause people to lose their lunch – is converted into a vomitorium while a frighteningly calm crew attend to the sick while continuing to wait on other diners. And it. Is. Gross. So repulsive and startling that as a viewer you’re not sure what the Hell to do – laugh or be revolted. For me it was certainly both, but I can tell you, I’ve rarely seen a setting in a movie that I recoiled more from than this. What’s interesting is that, before the big gross-out, you’re already on edge due to a number of unsettling interactions between the entitled guests and the ships perpetually inebriated and barely functioning captain played perfectly by Woody Harrelson. Add a screaming baby to the soundtrack, the constant sound of clanging glasses due to the boat rocking and a discussion between an elder arms-dealing couple and a pair of social media influencers, and it becomes a place intolerable to every sense we possess. The film on the whole is wonderfully mad, a bit of cathartic class-warfare that appealed to my sensibilities, but oh… the dining room of that boat DEFINITELY belongs at number one on this list.
Kick two, Pick Two:
Borrowed from the awesome Mike, whose idea this was. Since we did our Bottom Five Rooms, it only made sense to somehow rope in some disappointment into the episode. So for this edition of Kick Two, Pick Two, we’re going to do four terribly disappointing movies. And in a move that’s truly perverse, we have to keep two movies out of four when we’d most likely want to trash ALL of them. So, kind of the inverse of every other kick two, pick two we’ve done, and frankly more in keeping with the spirit of Filmjitsu.
So, the four disappointments we have to choose from:
Stars Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice
Alien 3
Godzilla (1998)