Four Rooms (1995)

Thanks for the memories!

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

This film has an interesting premise - four separate rooms with four unique stories told by four different directors. The setup, however, collapses under its own weight, as the differing viewpoints and various styles just confuse each other, leading to an unsatisfying payoff.The directors are talented, the actors do their jobs just fine, but the gimmicky nature of the film makes it difficult to fully enjoy. It becomes kind of a circus. I'd say the best part is the finger scene at the end, but you have to get through the whole movie just for that.I would recommend viewing each directors' work separately, instead of this failed attempt to weave their styles together in a hotel setting.

"Four Rooms" was a big flop in 1995, considering its hip roster of stars and directors. It's not very hard to see why. The first of the four sketches contains a shocking twist (we see the bare breasts of Ione Skye but only the bust of Madonna!), but serves no other purpose. The second is even worse - in fact, it's the worst of the lot. The third and the fourth are improvements; they are both extremely laborious, but at least the payoffs are good. Quentin Tarantino delivers one memorable Tarantino ("one-minute", though it's longer than that) speech; Tim Roth delivers a spastic, manic performance that is also memorable as a landmark in (deliberate?) bad acting. *1/2 out of 4.

An anthology film is often an interesting watch. Seeing as how multiple directors come together to create a project, if often gets people curious as to how each director's individual style meshes with the others, and what the finished film is like because of that. Sadly, most of the time, anthology films fail miserably, as the styles of each director are too different from one another to truly gel, meaning that while there may be standout parts here and there, they often don't work as complete films. Four Rooms unfortunately is one of the prime examples of this. While nowhere near as bad its initial hostile critical reaction would have you believe, the film is still very problematic.The story is that Ted the Bellhop is asked to look after a hotel during New Year's Eve and while there has to deal with multiple situations including a convent of witches, a hostage situation involving an angry husband, babysitting for a gangster's children & a bunch of drunken Hollywood stars and directors having a very dangerous bet. That is the basic story of the film, with four segments in the film directed by a different person for each. Connecting these stories is Ted the Bellhop, who is one of the film's major problems. Tim Roth delivers one of his worst performances to date as Ted, hamming it up every chance he gets, and gets annoying rather quickly. While the film is a comedy, it isn't as wacky or as farcical as Roth plays it, lacking the restraint and subtly that all the other actors have, which clearly shows that he wasn't well directed, acting like something out of Fawlty Towers, and considering the seriousness of some scenes, feels widely out of place. All of this makes Ted not only not funny, but very annoying and hard to care for, and you'll wish for him to go away as soon as possible.Each story varies in quality, although none of them are better than decent. The first one is The Missing Ingredient (directed by Allison Anders), whereby Ted has to have sex with a witch in order to create the ingredient needed in order to reverse the spell put on the coven's goddess Diana 40 years prior. It's about as ridiculous as it sounds. While it may appeal to some art-house fans, it is very corny, silly and cheesy. It is watchable though, acted well enough (Roth being the exception) and has a quirky charm to it that keeps you entertained throughout.The second segment is The Wrong Man (directed by Alexandre Rockwell), and is honestly the worst segment of this film by a country mile. I'll go as far as to say it is one of the worst things ever put on a cinema screen. It consists of Roth going into the wrong room for delivery service and encounters an angry husband with a gun, and believes Ted to be the one who slept with his wife. Everyone acts way over-the-top in a non-comedic scenario (making the piece tonally confused), has multiple plot holes (Why does the angry husband go into the bathroom during a hostage situation, giving Ted the perfect opportunity to free his wife or call the police? Why doesn't Ted take advantage of this either, or after he leaves for that matter? Why does the wife mock and taunt her angry gun-wielding husband?) and has some forced ambiguity about the husband's homosexuality that is never explored. It is frankly unwatchable, and considering that Rockwell was the one who had the idea for the film in the first place, leads me to believe that he made a terrible film, knew it and dragged in the other directors to make other segments to hope no-one would notice it. Sadly, they did and it is no wonder that Rockwell hasn't worked much since the film came out.The other two are the closet thing this film gets to decent. The Misbehavers (directed by Robert Rodriguez) is about Ted looking after some gangster's kids, with the instruction of not letting them misbehave. They do, and what follows maybe a one-joke skit, but it is quite funny, and the child actors are very good (Roth is thankfully restrained). It's unpleasantness towards the end (a dead hooker being found for example) may stop it from becoming great, but this is the best segment and it's punchline is priceless.The final segment is The Man from Hollywood (directed by Quentin Tarantino), whereby Ted goes to a room of famous Hollywood actors and directors playing a drunken bet to chop off someone's finger for a $1,000 and Ted gets involved in the process. While funny and well acted, this is the most pointless segment in the film as it builds up to the bet and then just ends very aburptly, as if nothing happened. Yeah, no negative psychological side effects can come from chopping off from someone's finger. Makes sense to me.Overall, this is just a failed experiment whose segments are widely uneven in terms of quality, the film is really smug at points and the thing connecting them together is really irritating and hard to care for. All of this combined makes this film something which while OK and not as bad as the critics at time would have you believe, isn't very good and it's no wonder why everyone involved has been actively trying to forget it ever happened. Sadly, it does and stands as a strong example as to why anthology film often don't work, as despite the talent behind camera, you often get overcooked messes like this. For curiosity's sake only.

Some reviewers posting here go on and on and (yawn) on as to why they loved the movie, whining all the while that it deserved better reception among audiences. I will not bore anyone to tears with my take on it, but will keep it simple and succinct: 3 directors took Tarantino's bait, and became deliriously, selfishly and obliviously self-indulgent in making tripe. When 50% of a movie is bad, the entire project is spoiled, and the first two shorts of this 4-parter are so over-the-top in stupidity (the first being stupid in an immature, pubescent sense, and the second being stupid simply because it is pointless rambling and nonsense). Those reviewers who favor Rodriguez and Tarantino can do much better than to point to this film as some work of art, which it cannot be since it was only a kiddie playpen for 4 buddies, and at the end of the day their diapers need changing.