The Room and Birdemic: Shock and Terror are two of the most notoriously, laughably, inexplicably poor indie films made this century. Now, it seems their Venn diagram of “Tommy Wiseau-directed madness” and “wretched animal genre schlock” has even more fully overlapped. Take a look: it’s the new trailer for Wiseau’s Big Shark!
Wiseau’s first narrative feature since 2003’s The Room, the film (its first trailer seen four years ago) sees him doing his own Syfy-style giant CGI animal predator movie featuring—you guessed it—a big shark. The bonkers writer-director leaning into being over-the-top camp is, of course, not nearly as interesting as the intense melodrama of the debut that made him a midnight movie staple. But, as Wiseau’s sitcom effort, The Neighbors, taught us, he’s still too oddball to even do irony normally, and this inevitably becomes a bizarre vehicle to sell his branded apparel.
Wiseau and his old pal Greg Sestero star as firemen whose job duties are for some reason expanded to include fighting a huge fish. Yet there’s hardly time to even give a “Hi, Mark” to our Room reunion in this teaser, which instead focuses mostly on a boxing match. Again, the guy can’t do anything normal, so somehow the trailer for the movie about a big shark is also about pugilism before it becomes a woefully self-referential thing about tossing around a ball and shilling boxer-briefs.
You can take the man out of The Room, but you can’t take the underwear off the man.
It should also be noted that the trailer’s touted BigSharkMovie.com just redirects you to TommyWiseau.com, where there’s no mention of the film or its release at all; it’s just about selling Tommy’s trash clothing. So it’s still unclear whether this is even a real movie.
So we’ll see! At some undetermined point!
