Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark already has audience rituals like The Room

Thirty minutes earlier than a midnight screening of Tommy Wiseau’s Big Shark at Chicago’s Music Box Theater, the person sitting in entrance of me and my husband circled with a sly grin and requested us “Are you cowboys?” I instantly guessed the place this was going, so I performed alongside and advised him, straight-faced, that no, we weren’t cowboys. “OK, then. You might need these,” he mentioned, providing me a field of tissues.

I had no concept what he was referencing, however I bought the vibe instantly. It was the equal of a Rocky Horror Picture Show veteran asking a beginner “Are you a virgin?” Clearly, this man was within the find out about a Big Shark gag I wasn’t in on but. But simply as clearly, he had a plan involving some sequence within the film, and he wished us to be able to take part.

Of course we had been in. I grabbed a tissue and braced myself for affect. Big Shark is clearly Wiseau’s riff on “huge predator menaces small town” motion pictures like Jaws or The Meg, although tonally, it’s nearer to Syfy originals like Sharktopus. But I wasn’t actually there for the shark assaults. I’d confirmed as much as see whether or not Big Shark was already turning into the brand new version of Wiseau’s notorious film The Room. This invitation to take part in some unknown gag made it clear that I used to be about to get precisely the expertise I’d been hoping for.

Oh hai, shark

Tommy Wiseau’s first film, The Room, is likely one of the most baffling items of outsider artwork ever made, and its success story is equally baffling. The narrative is incoherent. The script is filled with non sequiturs. Characters and plot factors are launched, then disappear endlessly with out remark. An excruciating intercourse scene is proven twice. The forged gives up a number of the most awkward line readings and bodily blocking identified to mankind.

Wiseau stars within the movie, and his half-mumbled, half-shouted efficiency and periodically mangled English are so mesmerizingly bizarre that a lot of his line readings — “Oh hai, Mark!” “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” “Everybody betray me! I fed up with this world!” — have change into memes, merch, and prompt shibboleths, traded round to determine those that have skilled The Room in all its complicated glory.

Theatrical showings of The Room shortly grew to become centered on audience participation and engagement. An complete Rocky Horror-esque ritual has grown up across the film. Participants throw plastic spoons, recite together with some strains and reply to others, and run all the way down to the display to mimic the film’s phenomenally clumsy football-tossing scene or to work together with Wiseau’s on-screen character. The routine is an element mockery, half celebration, half ego-driven public efficiency, as individuals compete to give you the cleverest new quip or get the most important snigger.

Big Shark just isn’t significantly better as a film. More than a decade after The Room premiered, it appears unattainable that Wiseau hasn’t gained some measure of self-awareness about his filmmaking. He’s been in on the joke for years, attending screenings of The Room, promoting his personal “Oh hai Mark” merch, and even showing in The Disaster Artist, the 2017 movie adaptation of Greg Sestero’s tell-all ebook about how The Room went so flawed. It was at all times a toss-up, although, whether or not his film’s rep as one of many worst movies ever made would push him to enhance as a filmmaker, or whether or not he would possibly consciously attempt to increase his fable by purposefully creating one other infamously unhealthy cult film.

Big Shark exhibits no signal that he did both of this stuff.

You’re tearing me aside, shark

Image: Wiseau-Films/YouTube

Big Shark facilities on three volunteer firemen — recreation and rugged Tim (Isaiah LaBorde), seemingly half-stoned Patrick (Wiseau), and angsty Georgie (Mark Valeriano) — attempting to cease a large shark from terrorizing New Orleans. (Sestero, Wiseau’s The Room co-star, was initially forged as Georgie and appeared in an early teaser trailer, however dropped out of the undertaking earlier than manufacturing.) The shark, which the characters inform us numerous instances is a 35-footer, skates by way of the streets weightlessly on sudden inexplicable gushes of shallow water, snatching individuals up in its jaws like the inconceivable digital monster that leaps out of nowhere to gobble up Samuel L. Jackson mid-speech in Deep Blue Sea.

Why does it fall on three firemen to save lots of the town? Why is nobody else doing something in regards to the shark? Why do the firefighters regularly interrupt their shark-hunting plans for beer pong and clumsy fights with their girlfriends? Why do they preserve repeating issues they’ve already mentioned, and holding atonal impromptu sing-alongs? This is the thriller of a Tommy Wiseau film.

But there’s no signal that any of it’s calculated or crafty. Big Shark is as mawkishly honest as The Room, full with equally unmotivated relationship drama, performed out in equally unconvincing methods. Once once more, the modifying is an absolute conundrum, with redundant scenes and reused footage. The sound combine is horrible, with characters’ voices blaring one second and all however disappearing the subsequent, even inside a single scene. A daytime sequence will all of a sudden change into an evening sequence, and vice versa, with no sense of elapsed time. Much of the dialogue seems to have been improvised on the day of taking pictures, with solely broad pointers in regards to the goal of any explicit scene.

Wiseau hasn’t gotten any higher at laughing, crying, or speaking in ways in which believably mimic any type of beforehand identified human conduct. The pacing is a nap, the shot-to-shot continuity is nonexistent, and the titular huge shark is a ridiculously low-cost, Birdemic-level particular impact that computer-savvy adolescents are routinely outdoing for newbie movie tasks on YouTube.

The audience cherished it.

Ha ha ha, what a narrative, shark!

Early on in Big Shark, it grew to become apparent that the man in entrance of us wasn’t the one one who had already seen the film. Big Shark presently isn’t accessible for streaming or on-line rental; it might solely be seen in theaters, as a part of an prolonged nationwide tour forward of a promised digital launch. (Finding out about screenings prematurely is a bit difficult: Wiseau’s web site and his many social media shops are solely erratically up to date, although The Room’s web site appears to have the latest data.) You would possibly assume that restricted availability would decelerate the expansion of a brand new Big Shark-based theatrical ritual. But lots of the individuals at my screening had been clearly veterans of The Room, and so they got here ready.

Tim and Patrick go diving a number of instances within the film, looking for the shark and encountering the identical batch of plastic kelp. Every time it reappeared, an audience member led a sing-along to the tune of The Beatles’ “Help!”: “Kelp! I need somebody! Kelp! Not just anybody! Kelp! You know I need someone! Keelllllp!” When Patrick’s girlfriend, Sophia (Ashton Leigh), tells Tim’s girlfriend, Charlotte (Erica Mary Gillheeney), to “implement discipline” with him to keep away from relationship issues, somebody within the audience made whip-cracking noises. The fixed mentions of the “big shark” had been met with a collective, choral “How big was it?” and an equally choral response of “Thirty-five feet!” A glimpse of a clear egg with an embryonic shark inside naturally began a sing-along of “Baby Shark.” Every on-screen devouring earned a cheer of “Big shaaark!”

The continuity issues bought loads of callouts. Wiseau’s character wears oddly bright-hued gloves that change colour from shot to shot: Someone behind me yelled “I hate my old gloves!” with a Wiseau accent to mark each colour change. “Why is it night?” each time a daytime scene goes darkish was a preferred query. Tim not often seems to be driving the identical car from scene to scene, which bought a repeated catcall of “Let’s change cars!” Patrick repeatedly yowls Sophia’s title throughout a very bizarre scene the place she tries besides him from their home for unclear causes: One wag behind the theater went full Streetcar Named Desire, echoing each shout of “Sophiaaaa!” with “Stellaaaa!”

There was prop comedy: The man in entrance of me introduced a sheet of cling wrap, which he held up, shouting “The plan is clear!”, first to echo the characters throughout their preliminary strategizing, then every time they reference “the plan” after that. There was dancing: The film ends with an prolonged New Orleans jazz stroll, and a few viewers bought as much as circle the aisles, strutting and pumping like the characters. There had been admonitions: When the shark swallows somebody entire, however one way or the other leaves behind an enormous pile of gore-soaked clothes and a single shoe, somebody yelled, “Hey, you forgot your blood!”

There had been loads of references to The Room’s acquainted audience script as properly. Any car in movement, whether or not it’s a automobile outracing the shark or an moored inflatable raft drifting slowly away, bought a chant of “Go! Go! Go!” The frequent bar scenes had individuals yelling “Johnny doesn’t drink!” A scene the place Georgie doesn’t wish to go after the shark bought a catcall of “You’re just a chicken. Chip-chip-chip-chip cheep-cheep!” With The Room’s audience ritual so properly established at this level, it was inevitable that a few of it will cross over, particularly within the early days of audiences discovering the movie and determining the way it’s distinctive from The Room, and the place it strains up.

But principally what I heard at Big Shark was what I heard the primary time I ever went to Rocky Horror: a room full of individuals collectively groping round for the proper pause factors within the script the place they might inject amusing line into the silence, or determining what gags or repeated call-and-response exchanges would attract probably the most shared participation.

Many of the quips and barbs within the theater had been unintelligible, with individuals talking over one another, or over the film’s muddled dialogue. Some of them simply weren’t humorous, and didn’t get a response. Sometimes the timing was off — presumably as a result of most viewers don’t know the script properly sufficient to know what the savvier viewers had been responding to. Big Shark’s Chicago audience, no less than, hasn’t discovered its rhythm but.

Anyway, how is your shark life?

Image: Wiseau-Films/YouTube

But it’s working towards discovering that rhythm. The tissue I used to be supplied half-hour earlier than the film? It got here in helpful when Patrick and his associates endure a loss, and weep inconsolably for a second earlier than Patrick tells Tim that cowboys don’t cry. Then all of a sudden they’re singing collectively, a grating, tuneless, barely musical group howl of the identical 4 strains again and again and over:

Cowboys don’t cry
And heroes don’t die
Sparkles within the sky
So I gained’t cry

We threw our tissues within the air. We swayed and waved them forwards and backwards like lighters at a live performance as this four-line track dragged on and on. And clearly, we sang alongside in celebration.

This isn’t Big Shark’s solely horrible semi-song: Patrick croons a bit ditty to Sophia’s magnificence, and turns a drunken promise to save lots of the town into an improvised sing-along with Tim. But “Cowboys Don’t Cry” (and its inevitable prolonged reprise) was the actual inflection level for the film’s nascent and rising audience ritual. It was the purpose the place all of us agreed on the way to reply, and the way to respect the sheer weirdness of what was occurring on display. It was a unifying second of pure celebration — like a public Rocky Horror efficiency, like a exhibiting of The Room, like one of many many sing-along screenings of musical motion pictures that periodically tour the nation.

It’s unlikely that Big Shark will ever absolutely substitute The Room for followers of unhealthy motion pictures and collective experiences. The Room has a decade-long head begin, and it has the benefit of being a film like nothing its followers had ever seen earlier than. Big Shark feels extra like a derivative or an echo than a completely new factor — an opportunity to see extra of Wiseau’s extraordinarily unusual method of wanting on the world, however not an “I can’t believe this movie exists” revelation in the identical method The Room was. It faucets into the identical properly of humor, however with much less novelty worth. It has extra motion, extra blood, extra of a plot, and the odd benefit of being a sort-of kind-of group musical expertise, nevertheless it’s nonetheless more likely to stay completely in The Room’s shadow.

But for the second, attending a screening of Big Shark is a reasonably fascinating probability to observe a brand new cinematic ritual trying to be born. For some, it may very well be an opportunity to place an enduring stamp on a brand new audience-participation expertise: While there are regional variations between the signature rituals round different motion pictures, favourite strains and gags are likely to get handed invisibly from area to area, and it’s no shock when a very well-timed, humorous little bit of viewer interplay in a Portland theater all of a sudden exhibits up at a DC screening. For different viewers, it’s simply an opportunity to watch the method in motion. Either method, in the event you’re seeing Big Shark in a theater, keep in mind to deliver your tissues — assuming you aren’t a cowboy.