Four Rooms (1995) **

 

I was really excited to re-watch this movie. I saw it when it came out, and I remembered the basic premise: 4 mini-movies based in four different rooms of a hotel, each with a different writer/director. These directors were all hot in the mid-90's: Allison Anders (“Gas Food Lodging”), Alexandre Rockwell (“In the Soup”), Robert Rodriguez (“El Mariachi”), and last but not least, Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”). What I forgot about this movie is that while everyone was excited to see it in 1995, we were all disappointed by it.

The stories are set in the Mon Signor Hotel. On his first night on the job, bellhop Ted (Tim Roth) has bizarre encounters in four different rooms of the hotel. In the Honeymoon Suite (“The Missing Ingredient” by Allison Anders), he is seduced by a beautiful witch. In room 404 (“The Wrong Man” by Alexandre Rockwell), he is drawn into a bizarre, violent love triangle. In yet another, he gets roped into a babysitting gig (“The Misbehavers” by Robert Rodriguez), and in the penthouse he is recruited to help act out an old Alfred Hitchcock Presents story-line (“The Man From Hollywood” by Quentin Tarantino).

This is a great setup for a cinephile's wet dream. You've got four great indy directors at the top of their game, teamed with a ridiculously talented cast, including Tim Roth, Ione Skye, Antonio Banderas, Lili Taylor, Bruce Willis, and Jennifer Beals. Problem is, everyone here is so excited to be in what was obviously going to be the coolest movie of the year that they just chew scenery like a T. Rex in a Kansas feedlot. Roth plays Ted with twitchy affectations that look like a cross between a swishy, gay man and a patient in the middle stages of Huntington's Disease. Tarantino was known for scenes that feel like real conversations, but the dialogue in his segment feels manic, strained, and not real at all. Anders had the good grace and good sense to have a couple of her actresses be topless for most of her vignette, but that is its only saving grace. Rodriguez's “The Misbehavers” is probably the best story here, but that isn't saying much. “Four Rooms” should be a wonderful, little time capsule of mid-90's art cinema. Instead, it's a weird mishmash, less than the sum of its parts, and not representative of any of the 4 directors' work.

2 stars out of 5