Four Rooms(1995)

Over the course of his first night as a night shift bellhop at the Hotel Mon Signor, Ted (Tim Roth) has sex with a woman belonging to a coven of beautiful witches so she can collect his semen for her coven in order for them to break a spell on the goddess Diana (which works, and Ted also impresses her so much with his sexual prowess that she gives him her phone number after they finish), narrowly escapes a harrowing fantasy hostage situation being put on by married couple Sigfried (David Proval) and Angela (Jennifer Beals), and babysits the misbehaving son and daughter of an unnamed married couple (Antonio Banderas & Tamlyn Tomita), which leads to them finding the body of a dead prostitute in the boxspring under the mattress of the bed that the parents have been sleeping in, accidentally setting the room on fire with spilt alcohol and a lit cigarette (which, thankfully, the fire sprinklers put out), and then the daughter stabbing Ted in the leg with a used syringe that she randomly found in the bed’s nightstand.

Thoroughly freaked out and stressed by everything that he has been through (mainly the latter two events), Ted decides that he can’t work at the hotel for another minute more and calls his boss, Betty (Kathy Griffin), while she is hosting a New Year’s party at her home to let her know that he is quitting. One of the partygoers, Margaret (Marisa Tomei), picks up the phone first, and after he angrily tells her that he wants to speak to Betty because it is an emergency, she senses that he has not been having the best night and winds up getting him to tell her all about the first two situations that he ended up in. He soon loses his patience with her and orders her to hand the phone over to Betty, so she does so, and he proceeds to fill Betty in on all of the details concerning what he just went through with the misbehaving kids before declaring that he is walking out the door right now. Just then, the hotel’s switchboard goes off, and Betty asks him if that is the penthouse suite calling. After he confirms that it is, she tells him that big-time movie director Chester Rush (Quentin Tarantino) is staying in that suite with some friends and they likely want something, and she asks him to take care of Chester before he leaves. When he flatly refuses, she tells him that, while she understands that he has had a really horrible night, Chester is the most important guest staying at the hotel right now, plus the hotel has been making a comeback in business this decade and a movie star clientele is important to that comeback. In the end, Ted decides to take care of Chester, but he tells Betty to get over here immediately. After they hang up, he answers Chester’s call.

20 minutes later, Ted arrives outside the penthouse suite with some items that Chester ordered, but he is greeted at the door by Angela (who was invited up here by Chester after he and his entourage met her at the hotel’s pool), and she informs him that Sigfried is passed out in their room from all of the drugs and alcohol that he had consumed during their psychosexual drama. Chester invites Ted inside and even lets him drink some champagne with him, and he also introduces him to his friends Norman (Paul Calderon) and Leo (an uncredited Bruce Willis). When Chester and Norman decide to go over what Ted brought up to the room, we find out that – among other things – Chester asked for a block of wood, a bucket of ice, and a very sharp cleaver (which is substituting for a hatchet that he originally asked for), and Norman instructs Ted to bring the items over to the counter of the room’s bar. Shortly afterwards, Ted finds out from everyone that they all want him to take part in re-enacting a scene from The Man From Rio, starring Peter Lorre and Steve McQueen, that involves the items resting on the counter: Peter Lorre’s character bet Steve McQueen’s character that he couldn’t light his cigarette lighter ten times in a row, so they came to an agreement where, if Steve successfully completed this challenge, he would get Peter’s new car, but if he failed, then he would get his pinky finger chopped off. Chester and Norman just made the same bet between each other, with Norman being in Steve McQueen’s position, and they tell Ted that they want him to be the person who will chop off Norman’s pinky if he fails, given the fact that he is both impartial and sober.

Ted immediately heads for the door, having no desire to perform such a gruesome task, but Chester gets his attention with a $100 bill and tells him that this money is his if he hangs out with them for just one more minute, and if he wants to leave after that, then he can just take the money and go. Ted accepts his offer, and when he sits back down at the bar, Chester proceeds to try to entice him into doing the task by gradually offering him an additional $900 for it while first explaining that he and his friends are going to go through with this bet whether Ted is the one wielding the cleaver or not, then asking him if he wants to remember this moment for the rest of his life as the moment where he refused $1,000 for one second’s worth of work, or the moment where he made $1,000 for one second’s worth of work. Ted chooses the latter option, and when the bet begins, Norman fails to get his lighter to light up on the first attempt, so Ted quickly chops off his pinky, swipes up his money and pockets it, and heads right out of the suite and back down the elevator. As the credits roll, Leo calls up a doctor he earlier retained who is waiting for him, Chester, and Norman in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Hospital (and whom was earlier made aware of the bet by them and what might happen), and after he lets him know that Norman just had his pinky cut off, he and Chester put the severed digit into the bucket of ice and then take that and the screaming Norman into the elevator so they can rush him to the hospital and get the doctor to reattach it to his hand. Angela simply returns to her room.