Room Temperature, dir. Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley, 2025, USA/France, 92 min.
Friday, June 20, 2025, 8:30 pm, Roxie Theater 💩🙄🥱😑
⚠️ content advisory: disturbing themes
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| Room Temperature |
The most important thing you need to know about this film is the name Dennis Cooper. Yes, that Dennis Cooper, the malevolent entity responsible for Frisk, the absolute worst film I have ever been subjected to, not only in Frameline, but in my entire life. It was the closing night film for Frameline19, way back in 1995. It was so bad that, even though I walked out about halfway through the film, I stayed in the lobby, corralling other people as they left in disgust, so that we could go back in at the end of the film and boo the world premiere. The San Francisco Chronicle remarked in the coverage the next day that the booing drowned out the applause, and I am very proud to have been part of that.
So, with that background in mind, I have to say that Dennis Cooper is improving. Room Temperature is bad, and I definitely recommend against seeing it, but it is not nearly as bad as Frisk. Where Frisk was aggressively disgusting, Room Temperature is more blandly annoying, with just a soupçon of disgusting to remind you that, yes, this is a Dennis Cooper film. The story (I won’t dignify it with the word “plot”) centers on a family in the southern California desert. Every year, they host a haunted house for Hallowe’en, going to ever greater lengths to outdo the previous year’s edition, to the point of sleeping in tents in the backyard so that the house can be remade. The father is obsessed with this annual project, which, at least as far as we can tell from the film, is his absolutely only interest in life, to the exclusion of his wife, his kids, his job, and everything else.
Things get progressively weirder as they bring in outsiders to help with the project, and the story takes some unexpected turns, but always with a disinterested shrug. Most of the dialog is delivered with an impenetrably flat affect, with … … … … long pauses for no particular reason. Most of the cast (with the exception of the lead) are non-professional actors, and it shows. There’s a reason your 8th grade class video project didn’t win an Academy Award. The clip in the trailer captures the disinterested monotone of most of the film: “You have a ghost … but it’s a nice one.” And the kid in that clip, so minor a part he doesn’t even show up in the main credits, is actually one of the high points of the acting in the film.
Things happen with no rhyme or reason, and the characters’ reactions make no sense, logically or emotionally. There’s nothing to draw the viewer in, to give the viewer any reason to care about any of this. Some of it would be disturbing if you actually gave a flying fuck about any of it, but the filmmakers seemingly intentionally steered you away from that. So, yeah, Dennis Cooper is getting — I won’t say better, but “less awful” — but I still recommend AVOIDING this one.
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