Movie Review: 'Best F(r)iends Vol. 2'

If LARP-ers re-enacted scenes from No Country For Old Men, the result might look something like Best F(r)iends Volume 2, Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau's gloriously baffling dream come true. Like the first volume of Best F(r)iends, Best F(r)iends Volume 2 is some high level nonsense, an incompetently accomplished masterpiece of Z grade cinema.

To recap, Volume One of Best F(r)iends introduced us to Jon (Sestero) as a homeless man befriended by Harvey (Wiseau), a mortician. Harvey offers Jon work in his mortuary and in the course of their budding friendship, Jon discovers that Harvey has a habit of taking gold and silver teeth out of corpses and keeping them. When the two discover that there is an underground market for dental gold and silver, they begin a scheme to make thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately, greed and mistrust come to drive Jon and Harvey apart and with the urging of Jon's new girlfriend, Traci (Kristen StephensonPino), a scheme is hatched to make sure that Harvey isn't trying to cut Jon out of his portion of their newfound fortune. This is a straightforward retelling of what happened in Best F(r)iends Volume 1 but it is mostly inferred on my part as Volume 1 is a baffling mix of incompetent storytelling and straight up, inexplicable strangeness.

That's the charm of Best F(r)iends Volume 1, incomprehensibility. People who watch it out of curiosity and a love for Wiseau's The Room have been gifted a movie that is every bit as charmingly incompetent as The Room but with a great deal more unearned pretension. Best F(r)iends Volume 1 and 2 each play like what an outsider thinks film school art projects look like.

Best F(r)iends Volume 2 picks up the story in the aftermath of what we were led to believe was Harvey falling to his death. Is Harvey dead? I won't spoil the fun here but Wiseau is off-screen a great deal more than I would like as he is unquestionably the best thing about both Best F(r)iends movies. Wiseau's levels of weird take a mundane thriller plot and elevates it to something wildly, hysterically, oddly, brilliant.

Jon and Traci are on the run with the stolen ATM where Jon and Harvey had kept their teeth money. Unfortunately, they don't have the keys to get the thing open and to get at the money. For this, Traci enlists the help of her Uncle Rick, played with bizarre brio by former soap opera hunk Rick Edwards. Uncle Rick is a needlessly macho rancher who blows everyone off the screen with his hilariously manly posturing.

This leads to a desert set piece that pretends towards Josh Brolin's run for his life in No Country for Old Men but earns only riotous laughter for the costumes, the pacing and the payoff; oh that payoff. If you imagine what a Sweded version of No Country for Old Men might look like then you have an idea of what this remarkably hysterical action sequence from Best F(r)iends Volume 2 looks like. Really though, it must be seen to be believed.

I think I can say with some certainty that Best F(r)iends is not some intentionally terrible filmmaking that works as outsider art but rather, a genuinely incompetent attempt at making a thriller. Director Justin MacGregor had me fooled in Volume 1 where I believed his direction was intended to recreate the silliness of The Room while leaving doubt as to whether the badness was intended. Volume 2 however, with its ludicrous number of establishing shots and stumblebum plotting seems to indicate the poignant sincerity of this effort.

That sincerity of effort is lovely and lends the film pathos to go with the wonderful weirdness of Tommy Wiseau's performance. Wiseau is a wildcard and his Harvey is blissfully unpredictable in the most hilarious and unintentional ways. You can sense that Wiseau is deathly serious about Harvey's intentions, his lessons that he's imparting to Jon through both films, and with the way Best F(r)iends Volume 2 plays out, it's uproariously funny.

I love Best F(r)iends Volume 1 and 2. I love the weirdness, the intended or unintended incompetence, the sincere attempts at making a real movie and the ungodly, laugh out loud moments that result. There was seemingly no possible way for Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero to match the hype of The Room and yet, against all odds, they created Best F(r)iends, a pair of movies every bit as bizarre, incomprehensible, and so bad it's brilliant as The Room.