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‘Four Rooms’
By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
December 29, 1995
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There's A fundamental problem with anthology movies, the ones with two or more shorts linked thematically together (usually horror flicks or animation "festivals"). Inevitably, some are better than others or, conversely, some are conspicuously worse than the rest. The whole ends up as strong as its weakest link."Four Rooms," directed by Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, does not suffer from this relativity problem. But that's because the segments are uniformly weak. There are flashes of good stuff. But most of the time, the movie, in which hotel bellboy Tim Roth caters to four rooms' worth of difficult, dangerous or scheming guests during the worst New Year's Eve of his life, is a tall glass of flat bubbly. For a multiple lineup of talent that includes Antonio Banderas, Madonna, Marisa Tomei, (an uncredited) Bruce Willis and Tarantino, this is especially sobering. Alone on duty at the faded Mon Signor hotel in Los Angeles, harried bellhop Ted (Roth) answers a series of room service calls. In Anders's "Strange Brew," a coven of witches (Valeria Golino, Madonna and Lili Taylor) gathered for a bizarre ritual, summon Ted for the one ingredient they're missing—a sperm deposit. In Rockwell's "The Wrong Man," Ted finds himself facing a gun-toting lunatic (David Proval) who accuses the bellboy of sleeping with his wife (Jennifer Beals). Then, in Rodriguez's "The Misbehavers," Ted has to baby-sit the unruly children of a brooding gangster (Antonio Banderas). Finally, in Tarantino's "The Man From Hollywood," a celebrity called Chester Rush (Tarantino) and his friends (Paul Calderon and Willis) replay a nasty game from an old Alfred Hitchcock show: Chester bets Norman (Calderon) he can't flick his lighter 10 consecutive times. If Norman fails, he must have his pinkie finger chopped off. This being a Tarantino film, there's a macabre little punch line, which is the best (well, most jarring) moment in the movie. It only makes you wish there had been other moments like this. FOUR ROOMS (R) — Contains nudity, profanity and violence.
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