The Room is different from other bad movies. Anybody who has seen it knows this. Its success is so potent, and the film is so rewatchable and addictive because it resides in an exclusive liminal space between the token wonderfully bad genre movies (e.g., Plan 9, Hobgolbins, Troll 2, and everything in between) and infuriatingly incompetent beyond-amateur crap like Manos: The Hands of Fate or Birdemic. The Room is so incredibly unique in part because, at a $6 million investment from the enigmatic Tommy Wiseau that covered everything from production to advertising, this is bad filmmaking on a relatively “large” scale. With The Room, Wiseau found himself in the impossible position of being able to – as the film’s sole source of funding – exercise total creative control while simultaneously displaying unwieldy incompetence regarding the entire filmmaking process.

Join us each week as Rob Hunter takes a look at new DVD releases and gives his highly unqualified opinion as to which titles are worth BUYing, which are better off as RENTals, and which should be AVOIDed at all costs. And remember, these listings and category placements are meant as informational conversation starters only. But you can still tell Hunter how wrong he is in the comment section below. This week sees a dearth of DVDs worth Buying (although if you don’t have a copy of The Year Without A Santa Claus by now you should really pick up the latest reissue) and only one Avoid (Christmas In Canaan starring Billy Ray Cyrus). But there is plenty worth Renting this week including a light British indie called Bomber, a Hasidic crime caper called Holy Rollers, and a movie about two girls who have their mouths sewn to someone else’s cornhole. Yay!

The winds of change are blowing here in Austin, Texas. With Fantastic Fest over, a tad-bit of emptiness has washed over the land and left me yearning for more great genre experiences. Which brings me to this week’s selection of Blu-ray releases — one that includes a few unique genre flicks and one lovable turd that reminds me of a documentary that was launched into the stratosphere by the film community here in Austin. Also, there’s this animated movie from the Mouse House that will absolutely blow your mind on Blu-ray. It’s as if the cosmos has looked down upon us in our post-Fantastic Fest haze and said “hey, here are some good movies to satiate your need for the good stuff.” It’s a week full of releases that are delivered right on time, just as the leaves start to change and Halloween begins to peek its head around the corner. Time to spray blood on the walls and fall in love again with a tale as old as time, or some other confused multi-metaphor. It’s another round of This Week in Blu-ray.

Welcome to another hearty serving of Junkfood Cinema: it’s why the terrorists hate us. Our resident junkfood expert is busy chomping on Double Downs and Twizzlers in between medically-mandated cubes of celery in a hospital in Austin as he recently suffered an excitement-induced seizure from all the hooplah surrounding Fantastic Fest which, ironically and tragically enough, means that Mr. Salisbury has been mandated by his doctor to stay at least 100 feet away from Fantastic Fest at all times. Mr. Salisbury is currently on suicide watch, and friends and family are keeping him company around the clock, making sure he doesn’t decide to pull the plug and order Bill Miller BBQ. So clearly FSR’s resident vegetarian/skinny jeans aficionado/pinko/walking cliché/guy-who-weighs-less-than-150 is the obvious choice to fill in for the ailing Mr. Salisbury until he gets back on his feet. And do so I proudly will, for as the ever-inspiring mantra in FSR headquarters goes, “when one of our men is down…find somebody else to temporarily take his place.” So this week, in a special FDA-unapproved edition of Junkfood Cinema, I’ll be giving some kickass insight into that exponentially popular piece of anti-vegetarian propaganda known as Troll 2 (1990), the film that inspired M. Night Shyamalan to see if he could possibly do any worse (spoiler: he could).

I argued in a Culture Warrior article last year that bad films give audiences a degree of power and authority over the enormous and intricate machinations of filmmaking – in other words, that in an industry so large, with so many levels of production and with such a complex process from inception to completion, for a work of incompetence to somehow arise is an instance of seemingly impossible serendipity. Bad films are more believably possible – and come about, arguably, more often – through the process of independent filmmaking, a venue where resources may be limited but accountability may be absent altogether. Thus, a masterpiece of incompetence like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is likely if not inevitable when there are significant sources of funding provided by a first-time feature director who doesn’t know the first thing about narrative storytelling, much less the difference between 35mm and HD cameras – or Troll 2, in which a language barrier also provided a barrier to competent filmmaking.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to finally see Best Worst Movie, Michael Stephenson’s delightful documentary about the fan culture surrounding the “worst movie of all-time,” Troll 2. It was excellent. And now it’s invading Austin and the rest of the country in style…

SXSW is less than two weeks away, so it’s only appropriate that one of the cinematic champions of SXSW 2009 is making noise. Best Worst Movie, the charming and hilarious documentary chronicling the cult phenomenon of the movie Troll 2, has been picked up by Area23A.

The Troll 2 cult phenomenon is seemingly unexplainable. That didn’t stop Michael Paul Stephenson from directing a fascinating documentary, Best Worst Movie, about the transformation of the film from a movie mess to must see territory. We had the chance to talk to Stephenson, an incredibly gracious filmmaker, at SXSW about the chance to exorcise the goblins from his life.

How do you combat the burden of being an actor attached to Troll 2, the worst film of all time? If you’re Michael Paul Stephenson, you film a stunning documentary, Best Worst Movie, that chronicles the unexplainable phenomenon that has turned Troll 2 from a bargain bin film into a cult classic.