Film Review: Miracle Valley & The Room Double Bill

When I heard that Broadway Cinema was showing a double bill of The Room and Greg Sestero’s new film Miracle Valley, I knew I would end up deeply regretting it if I didn’t go. I didn’t know too much about the new project but it sounded like a quirky, possibly cheesy horror, which was fine by me. If it was no good, I’d have a Q&A with Sestero and then The Room to look forward to.  

If you somehow haven’t heard of The Room, then let me enlighten you. Nearly twenty years ago, unknown visionary director, writer and actor Tommy Wiseau came up with an idea for a film that would make him infamous. It’s impossible to describe the storyline because it often descends into chaos – there’s a love triangle, lots of throwing ball and a strange kid called Denny. Sestero plays Mark, the best friend of Wiseau’s tragic protagonist, Johnny.

It’s possibly one of the best-worst films in the world and has gained a cult following. Whenever a screening comes along, people are drawn like a moth to a flame. In the same way as Rocky Horror, it invites audience participation, often with spoons. When a young model and actor, Greg Sestero met Wiseau in acting class, he couldn’t possibly have known what it was going to mean to get involved with this upcoming film project, and little would he have known that he would still be using it as a promotional tool two decades later.

Miracle Valley turns out to be a folky horror romp that draws inspiration from films such as The Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Mandy, in which a photographer and his girlfriend have been invited to spend a holiday in a remote house in the middle of the Arizona countryside. The photographer is in search of an elusive bird that no-one has been able to photograph, and he has brought his partner along as a surprise. He invites his friends to join them, they settle in for a good time and then the cult members start to show up, and things start to get weird.

Often horror can be a real mixture: gruesome, thrilling, hilarious. I would definitely say that Miracle Valley is all three. It was interesting to find in the Q&A afterwards that Sestero himself acknowledged the camp, humorous parts. I wondered if he was trying to instigate the type of funny found in The Room (the irony being that The Room was never intended to be funny in any way). If he was, I’d say he hit about a 50% success rate. 

Sestero talked about the collaborative element that went into making the film, where different members of the cast and crew could suggest ways in which the action or dialogue would be served better by certain changes. Even now, he’s unconvinced by a particular severed arm, but acknowledges how well both the cast and the test audience responded to it. He notes that’s what film is about after all – a team effort, not a solo endeavour. Most of the special effects were done with prosthetics rather than CGI which gave it a really nice, old-timey quality.  When asked what his favourite head trauma scene was, Sestero chuckled and instantly replied that he loved the effects in Mandy, which should give you a clue.

I think the whole audience was really rooting for this new film to be good, but it could be that with the promise of a film that everyone already loved, people weren’t so blown away by it. It was entertaining, but I probably won’t find myself watching it again. For his next project, Sestero will be taking on UFOs in Forbidden Sky, which should be interesting. I hope he has success, but I doubt whether he will ever be able to truly leave The Room behind.

Did you know? Greg Sestero’s favourite scene in The Room is when the drug dealer Chris-R appears, which is delightfully crazy and which makes barely any sense. His least favourite is the second sex scene, because of the over dubbed noises – if you know, you know.