Paid $15 to stream 'The Room' on a random site and it buffered every 3 minutes

I finally caved and paid to watch 'The Room' after hearing everyone rave about it for years. The site I used was some shady streaming service that claimed to have it in HD, but it kept freezing during the football scene. I lost my $15 and ended up watching the rest on YouTube in worse quality for free. Has anyone else gotten burned by a random streaming site for a cult classic?

3 comments

3 Comments

reese_lee91mo ago

Wait, did you actually get to see the "I did not hit her" scene in all its glory or did it cut out right when he throws the water bottle? Because that's the thing nobody talks about with these cult classics - the timing of the buffering always seems to hit at the worst possible dramatic moments. I watched The Room on a site that kept glitching during the hospital scene with the flower shop guy and it totally killed the emotional impact of that beautiful disaster. You probably missed the part where the kid throws the football to himself in slow motion, which is honestly the purest moment in cinema. YouTube's compression actually works in its favor for that movie though, the lower quality makes the green screen effects look even more surreal.

price.ben1mo ago

...and that green screen quality issue is exactly why I actually prefer watching The Room on a cheap laptop with a bad screen. My old Dell has this weird color tint that makes the sky in the rooftop scenes look like a blue screen of death. It adds this extra layer of unintentional horror. I tried showing it to my buddy on a nice 4k TV and it just looked like a regular bad movie, not the beautiful train wreck it's supposed to be. The compression artifacts and buffering are part of the experience now, like how people watch old horror movies on VHS for the grain. YouTube's algorithm actually recommended me a 144p version last week and I swear it made the whole thing funnier.

park.miles1mo ago

That buffering during the football scene actually made me laugh harder than watching it smoothly.