My girlfriend thinks that fantasy baseball is a waste of time. I’m starting to agree with her, because if it wasn’t for fantasy baseball, I may have never watched or even heard of The Room.

Earlier this year, I joined a fantasy baseball league through my friend Carl and was told that everyone’s team names were references to The Room. Since I never saw The Room, or even heard of it before this, I named my team Never Saw The Room. Naming your team Never Saw The Room in a league of devotees to The Room leads to people telling you that you have to see the movie.

It turns out I really didn’t.

The Room is hailed as one of those it’s-so-bad-it’s-good movies and has developed a cult following similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. People go to midnight screenings dressed as the characters, and Adult Swim ran it once as an April Fool’s joke. Unlike Rocky Horror, there are no catchy songs and the acting is much, much worse.

It’s on par production quality-wise with your average Skinimax movie. There’s the cheesy synthesized music, the slow-cam sex scene (behind a gauze curtain no less!), and very crappy acting matched with very crappy dialogue.

The director, writer and star of The Room, Tommy Wiseau, scares me on many levels. He’s a mess of White Snake era hair atop a roided up Long Island guido. But he can’t be from Long Island with that accent that stems from the “Ridiculous” region of Europe. He has the freakiest laugh in existence. It’s creepier and more off-putting than The Joker’s and he throws it into every line he can for his character Johnny. I imagine each of Johnny’s lines in the script looks like:

                            Oh, hi Denny.
                                   (creepy laugh)        

The scariest thing of all is that in Tommy Wiseau’s mind, The Room isn’t only a good movie, it’s a great movie. No, I take that back, his laugh is definitely the scariest thing. It hooks its way into your brain and could slowly drive you mad.

Tommy Wiseau also thought that viewers would want to see his lumpy, shaved body in multiple sex scenes. If you watch this movie, you will probably have the same thoughts I did during each sex scene, “Why are these guys all fighting over this chubby girl in the mom jeans?” and “Why is this roided up guy with the funny accent and red rose fetish so lumpy?” and “Why am I still watching this?”

The Room is definitely the worst movie I’ve seen this year. In fact it might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I’m amazed that people want to watch this more than once. It’s like sadomasochism for cinephiles. It’s cinemasochism.

WARNING: If you watch the interview with Tommy Wiseau about the movie that’s on the DVD, your brain cells might decide “Fuck it” and commit mass suicide.

The one good thing about watching The Room was catching the references of team names in my fantasy baseball league, like Denny, Scotchka and Favorite Customer. A couple had to be explained to me after the fact, namely Wizzo (soundalike for Wiseau) and Sestosterone (nickname for Greg Sestero, who plays Johnny’s back-stabbing pal).

But even here The Room disappoints. Half the league doesn’t have The Room specific names. Rookies, El Sid and Bone In have nothing to do with The Room at all. This whole time I assumed that Griffey’s Aces was the only non-The Room name. Hey, I get it, the guy is obsessed with Ken Griffey Jr. and doesn’t want to tow the line, that’s fine. I’ve been wondering for weeks what the hell a Bone In was and got no answer from The Room. It turns out it just refers to the nickname of the guy who created the team.

I think my friend Carl put it best when he described The Room: “Rarely has one put so much effort into making something great and misfired so spectacularly in every single way possible.”

Moral of the story: Stay away from fantasy baseball, kids. It’s a stepping stone to much darker things.