#74 Troll 2 (Wes)

 
Troll 2

It happened with Plan 9 From Outer Space, so it was bound to happen again sooner or later, we get to watch a movie that I genuinely love. Troll 2 is one of these, and is one of the rare movies that isn’t just so bad it’s good, but is actually a film that is so bad that it’s a work of pure, unadulterated genius (like The Room).

Directed by Drake Floyd (a pseudonym for Claudio Fragasso – an Italian low budget horror movie writer/director), Troll 2 follows the tribulations of Joshua Waits (Michael Stephenson) and his family as they take a family swap vacation in the town of Nilbog. The movie starts with Joshua being told the story of goblins by his (dead) grandfather Seth (Robert Ormsby), and how they turn humans into plants so they can eat them. The next day Joshua, his sister Holly (Connie McFarland) and parents Michael (George Hardy) and Diane (Margo Prey) drive to Nilbog, followed by Holly’s boyfriend Elliot (Jason Wright) and his friends. When the Waits family get to their summer home, they find a huge meal waiting for them, which Joshua prevents them from eating (more about that later), after Seth warns him that it’s how the goblins turn them into food. As the goblins slowly capture and kill Elliot’s friends, it comes down to Joshua to save his family and defeat the goblins and their queen Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed).

 

  

I’m sure the observant reader will have noticed something about this movie that does make its title a little misleading… There are no trolls in this movie. It was originally produced under the name Goblins, but in a desperate attempt to try to get people to watch this movie, it’s distributers renamed it Troll 2 in an attempt to market it as a sequel and capitalise on the 1986 classic Troll (Strange fact: Troll featured an actor (Michael Moriarty) from another of my favourite films, The Stuff, playing a character called Harry Potter. Strangely The Stuff is one of Rupert Grint’s favourite movies too. Grint is famous for playing Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter movies. Coincidence?).

So apart from the fact that there are no trolls in a movie called Troll 2, what else is wrong with it? Well try pretty much everything. It has a ridiculous story, some of the worst monster make-up seen since the B-movie heydays of the 50s and 60s, acting that wouldn’t be good enough to be in a late night infomercial and a script so bad that even Madonna would turn it down. So why do I love it? See all of the above and so much more.

  

This movie is actually so bad that it has a documentary about it called Best Worst Movie. Made by Michael Stephenson, it follows George Hardy as he travels to screenings and conventions promoting the now cult movie. It’s actually a genuinely good documentary, which is funny, touching, and quite tragic at the same time, and is well worth tracking down.

As you watch this documentary, you discover how bizarrely inept the making of Troll 2 was. The first thing you learn is that none of the actors in this movie were actually professional actors. Of course this is absolutely no surprise if you’ve seen Troll 2, the acting is on a level with the worst of any local amateur dramatics society. In fact it’s so bad, that it makes the next random popstars foray into a film look like an Oscar worthy performance. The actors who were cast in the lead roles actually went to the auditions hoping to be cast as extras. George Hardy was, and still is a small town dentist (he actually still did dental work whilst the movie was being filmed), which just brings Ed Wood Jr’s casting of the chiropractor Tom Mason in Plan 9 from Outer Space (for more about that see our previous reviews) to mind. Don Packard (the store owner) was a resident at a local mental hospital, who was on a day trip. For most of the other actors too, this was their first film. For the majority it was also their last.

I would like to think that maybe the actors could have done a little better had the script not been so bad, but I think I’m maybe just being generous because I want to believe this. According to many of them in Best Worst Movie, they weren’t given a full script beforehand, claiming that they were given scenes just before they were due to film them. Claudio Fragasso vehemently denies this in the documentary, but it would explain a lot. The actors quite often deliver their lines like they’re reading them off of cue cards, speaking with all the emotional range of Judge Dredd. If the cast aren’t just speaking the script, then they are overacting worse than William Shatner ever could dream of. The worst for this by far is Deborah Reed, her performance can best be described as “stoned goth girl”. With a bizarre Eastern European accent and her wide-eyed acting, she steals every scene she’s in.
  

Claudio Fragasso and his wife Rosella Drudi, who weren’t fluent in English at the time, wrote the script itself. Rosella said that the story was based on a lot of her friends becoming vegetarian, which annoyed her at the time, which explains why the story itself is so bizarre. It also explains why it contains some of the most unintentionally funny lines that I’ve ever seen in a movie. I really don’t want to spoil it for you, so rather than tell you about these I think it’s probably best to give you a couple of links so you can see these for yourself. The first involves the aftermath of Joshua’s efforts to stop his family from eating the meal left for them by their goblin exchange family (I mentioned this earlier, and from this clip you can work out HOW Joshua stops his family eating the feast. This can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OiD6IlBmtk), the second shows Arnold (Darren Ewing) realising how the goblins turn humans into something that they are able to eat (and is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyophYBP_w4).

  

To turn the humans into something edible, then the goblins must feed them with some weird food that transforms their bodies. At no point in the movie do any of the characters actually stop to question why all the food and drink that they’re offered is a lurid green, The sort of green that’s never associated with food, and is only ever seen in the gunge (or slime for our American readers) that so often appears in Noel Edmonds TV shows, charity fundraisers and Nickelodeon. In fact once the humans are turning into vegetable matter, they look just like they’ve been gunged, or perhaps hugged by a giant slug with a really bad cold. Which brings me nicely onto the films make-up effects.

To say the make-up, or goblin costumes in this movie are bad is quite an understatement. They have to rank as some of the worst costumes made since the heydays of the 50s B-movies. They actually look like they’ve been made from papier-mâché and would have fitted in with a lot of the monsters from those movies, whether it was the sea-monsters with ping-pong ball eyes from The Horror of Party Beach, the rubbery walking tree stump from From Hell It Came, or the dogs wearing pointy teeth in The Killer Shrews. The costumes are so bad, that they actually make many of the monsters from the 70s episodes of Doctor Who look scary. 

Don’t let that put you off though. Like all movies with dodgy monsters they just add to the charm (would the Godzilla movies have been half as much fun without a man in a crappy rubber costume?), and charm is something that this movie has in abundance. How can you not love a movie that features a bizarre sex scene involving a trailers worth of popcorn? Or a mother who’s favourite song seems to be “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, yet doesn’t seem to know how to sing it. Or that has a child save the day with a sandwich (seriously). This movie has everything you’ve never wanted to see in a movie and it triumphs because of it.

I said at the beginning of the review that I love this movie and it really is true. I watch it at least once a month, and will happily watch it more often if I find someone who’s never had the joy of seeing this film. I also watch this whenever I’m feeling really down, as it’s just impossible to be unhappy watching this movie. Does this film deserve to be considered one of the worst movies ever made? Of course it does, but really don’t let that stop you from buying a copy right now. If there was ever a movie that deserves it’s cult status it’s this one. It truly is a film which was made to be enjoyed with friends over pizza and beer and that is a triumph for everyone involved. Just don’t eat or drink it if it’s bright green.