Four Rooms

Impressions before seeing it
I'd seen parts of it before over the years, but never the whole thing. I always thought the concept was kind of cool.

How was it?
Four Rooms is four short films, each taking place in a different room in the same hotel on the same night and connected by the bellboy (Tim Roth) performing his duties in each of them. Also, it's New Year's Eve and the bellboy is the only employee in the building.

The first room involves a group of women practicing witchcraft, attempting to revive an ancient goddess in the hot tub. Turns out they need the bellboy's sperm to finish the deal, but he doesn't want to be unprofessional by boning on the job. This one was weird and cartoony, and I don't think there has ever been a witchcraft story anywhere that interested me, so this was my least favourite.

The second room involves a husband and wife doing some bizarre and borderline sadistic roleplaying where she is gagged and bound to a chair, and he is crazy and wields a gun toward anyone who enters - which of course happens to be the bellboy. I didn't really "get" the roleplaying aspect, but the scene did manage to create tension and be entertaining, so it was better than the first one.

The third room involves a husband and wife who go out and leave their two kids unattended, asking the bellboy to check in every once in a while. "Don't misbehave!" the father warns them, as they proceed to do pretty much everything a kid shouldn't do and dragging the bellboy into the middle of it. This one, directed by Robert Rodriguez, was a funny and crazy "disaster comedy". Very enjoyable.

The final room, in the penthouse, involves a famous director (played by Quentin Tarantino, who also directed the segment) and his friends wanting to reenact a scene from the Alfred Hitchcock TV series. In short, they want to pay the bellboy a large tip to potentially cut off someone's finger. This one was my favourite, being a Tarantino fan, because it just has his recognizable dialogue and nuances. He knows how to write people hanging around doing nothing and still make it interesting. It's mostly one long (in terms of the whole short) setup for a really funny payoff at the end. A lot of critics apparently say the third room was the best one, but I would say they are already arranged in order from worst to best.

Recommendation
So to summarize, this is a fun movie with a unique concept, and Tim Roth plays the bellboy with a sort of lively but nervous energy, almost like he's strung out on drugs, that makes his participation welcome. The first two segments are too weird even for my taste, but it's worth sticking it out for the last two, and for the amusing interstitial between the last two that I neglected to mention above. Four Rooms bombed at the box office, just as Grindhouse did, which is a shame because both were experimental cult hits from Tarantino and Rodriguez. These guys should be better rewarded for their originality.