Have you ever seen a movie so bad, so wretched, so misguided that it actually loops around the enjoyment scale and becomes good? Sure, the television show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” has helped make cinematic abominations such as “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and “The Skydivers” watchable, but think of a movie without a commentary track that attains this dubious position.

It’s hard, huh? But there is one movie that does this. One movie wrapped in legend and surrounded in mystery. That movie is “The Room.”

The movie is written, produced, executive produced, directed and starring the same man. If that sounds like about four jobs too many, that’s because it is. With a voice like a half-drunk Croatian robot and a body that looks like it came from a Botero painting, Tommy Wiseau certainly has a distinctive screen presence. So pervasive, in fact, that nightly he haunts my nightmares.

The film is ostensibly about a man, Johnny, played by Wiseau, and how his relationship with his girlfriend Lisa fails because of her infidelity. This manifests itself in her seducing the clueless Mark, who is supposedly Johnny’s best friend. We know this because he repeatedly tells us. The dialogue here is so bad that it’s a wonder Wiseau can even speak English.

One particularly engrossing scene has him talking to a woman at a flower shop. Though she responds to his hello, she later says that she “didn’t recognize him,” and ends her part of the conversation by saying, “You’re my favorite customer.” For his part, Johnny says hi about seven times, including to a dog. Only his English is so bad that instead of hi it comes out as ‘hai,’ and becomes an instant catch phrase to adopt when greeting one’s friends.

“The Room” is an exercise in recognizing all that can go wrong with a movie. It has continuity errors, meaningless motifs, terribly stiff dialogue and atrocious acting. Story lines are brought up and then never resolved, as in when Denny, the young neighbor Johnny and Lisa look after, gets into trouble with a drug dealer.

The scene that is perhaps most iconic of the film isn’t even its own. Johnny’s epic outcry “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” is lifted from the iconic James Dean movie “Rebel Without a Cause,” though the lack of any discernible cadence in Wiseau’s voice takes a tragic moment and makes it hilarious.

This movie so bad that Kyle Vogt, the actor who plays Johnny’s friend Peter, quit the film during production, and his lines had to be given to another actor.

The most shocking thing, however, is that all of these terrible and poorly thought-out decisions coalesce to create a wholly engrossing movie-going experience. Such an enjoyable experience, indeed, that the film is regularly shown in theaters as the premiere ‘midnight movie.’

Fans have made an event of the showings, dressing up as Johnny, throwing footballs around the theater and yelling “Go! Go! Go!” as the camera does one of its many panning shots of San Francisco. It creates an atmosphere similar to live viewings of “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” only less sexually depraved and way more awkward.

The reason this movie is so enjoyable is because it is so cringe-worthy that there comes a point where the horribleness of it numbs the mind, and the only response left is to laugh. It is an ordeal best experienced with friends, one that will undoubtedly test the limits of your friendship, but one that may, with some luck and a lot of laughs, make it even stronger.