#74 Troll 2 (1990) (Colin)

We have been doing this blog for over 10 months now and the most common question I get asked is 'Why on Earth are you doing a bad movie blog?'.  I must admit 60 minutes into a movie with John Wayne trying to be Genghis Khan and I do ask myself the same question.

I have mentioned in other blogs the reasons, so apologies if I am repeating myself, but essentially it would have been all too easy to have done a blog about the top 100 movies.  You know any list you make would involve Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Star Wars etc and I would have ended up watching a bunch of movies I have already seen, that I know I like and would offer nothing new to me.

A bad movie list, in theory, should contain films I have never seen or wanted to see and offer something new to me.  I also thought it would be more interesting and good fun taking the piss out of bad films on Twitter and through our blogs, than to keep going on about how great a film was, how wonderful the plot is and the fantastic cinematography.  I can only praise how good a movie is so many times before it becomes repetitive, whereas because I am a cynical person, I have a million ways  to 'slag something off'.

However that has not always happened.  For our #80 film, Inchon, I stared at the computer screen for about an hour and I had absolutely nothing to say about it.  I was going to cut and paste the word 'shit' 1,000 times, which would have been quite dull, but far more exciting than watching the movie itself.  In fact the blank screen staring for 60 minutes was far more entertaining.

For every 4 or 5 Inchons though, we have come across some bad movie gold so far.  The fabulous Ed Wood's transvestite 'information' film, 'Glen or Glenda' or his low budget, camp, sci-fi classic, 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' or Tommy Wiseau's mumbling nonsensical classic 'The Room', (Oh hai!), are all brilliant movies and are my favourites so far.  These movies fall into that 'so bad, it's good' category' and are the type of movie that I hoped this list would unearth.  Yes, we had to watch a lot of crap to get there, but boy, was it worth it!

Our next movie was pointed out to me by Wes near the beginning of our bad movie journey as a film which very firmly fitted into that category.  In fact I think he said something like, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, that film is awful, it is bloody brilliant.  You MUST watch it!'.  A ringing endorsement indeed and if you haven't read his blog on this movie yet, then please do as it is brilliant and you do get the feeling he sort of likes the film :)

You see Wes knows that I like the 'so bad it's good' movie and Troll 2, the next movie on our list, fits the bill.  In fact it is part of a documentary called, 'Best Worst Movie Ever' and is considered to be just that by a very large following of fans.  I have to admit, I had not heard of it, which was a good thing, because this means the bad movie list is working.

So is Troll 2 really the 'Best Worst Movie Ever'?

#74 Troll 2

Troll 2 centres on a young lad called Joshua Waits, (played by Michael Stephenson) who is warned by his dead grandfather, Seth, (Robert Ormsby) about nasty little creatures who turn humans into vegetation, (a bit like Glee does) and eats them. Seth appears to Joshua like the ghost of Orson Wells Christmas past. In case you're wondering it's not Citizen Kane Wells but wine advertising Wells.

Joshua's family go on vacation to a small town called Nilbog. The family consists of dad Michael, (George Hardy), mum Diane, (Margo Pret) and big sister Holly, (Connie Young). Holly's boyfriend, Eliot, (Jason Wright) also follows them to Nilbog in a camper van with his pals, Arnold, (Darren Ewing), Drew, (Jason Steadman) and Brent, (David McConnell).

Along the way, Joshua sees a hitchhiker who Seth possesses to warn Joshua that Nilbog is in actual fact a town filled to the brim with those nasty vegetarian Goblins. This leads us into the first thing you'll notice about Troll 2 in that it contains absolutely no trolls whatsoever, none, nada, not a blinking sausage. The eagle eyed amongst you may have already spotted that the town of Nilbog is in actual fact Goblin spelt backwards. Presumably the lack of trolls explains why the town is not called Llort. Also if it was called Llort then the entire filming would have had to be moved to Wales, so logistically not practical either. Mlifparc was also rejected.

The Waits arrive at Nilbog and meet the family with whom they are going to house swap with for their vacation.  On entering the house they find a feast of yummy food all laid out for them as a 'welcome' present from their fellow house swapees.  The fact the food is covered with a green toothpaste like substance that resembles the colour of Puff the Magic Dragon's snot, does not seem to put them off and the Waits sit down to eat. 

Seth appears again, freezes time and warns Joshua that the food they are about to eat will turn them into vegetation which the Goblins will then eat.  He warns Joshua to find a way to stop them eating the food.  This leads to the funniest part of the movie as Joshua comes up with a very unique way to stop the family from eating the food.  It probably gives it away, so I'll put *spoiler alert* here, but this does lead to my favourite line from the movie as Michael scolds Joshua for spoiling the dinner they were about to enjoy and shouts, 'you can't piss on hospitality'.  Classic line!

Meanwhile, Arnold tries to help a woman called Cindy, who is being chased through the woods by Goblins.  They seek shelter in a chapel and meet the baddie of the movie, Creedence Leonore Gielgud, (Debroah Reed).  Creedence is a gothic cackling witch pantomime baddie, who, we are told, has come from Stonehenge. We could have guessed she was of British decent due to the state of her teeth. (I just thought I'd do that gag before our US readers beat me to it!).  Creedence is the Goblin Queen and uses magical whatsits to control the Goblins.  She displays her power by promptly giving Cindy a refreshing drink which turns her to green slime which the Goblins then yum right up. Arnold's quick mind realises something may be afoot here but it's too late as Creedence turns Arnold into a half man half tree combo.  Unfortunately his acting was so wooden from the start, you probably wouldn't notice.

In the morning, Michael and Joshua go to the store to purchase some non urine soaked food.  Joshua goes wandering and finds a church in which the locals are attending a sermon.  The locals are in fact Goblins too in human disguises and when they spot Joshua are none to pleased at his sneaking around and decide to force feed him some nice turns you into green slime ice cream.  Fortunately Michael finds Joshua in time, the preacher convinces everyone it was all a silly misunderstanding and by the time Michael and Joshua return home, the town has taken a quick short cut ahead of them and has laid on a lovely feast.  All food is topped with some more of the contents of a used tissue from Jurassic Park.

Joshua is having none of this malarkey and so runs off to find his dead grandpa, finds him, grandpa throws a lightening bolt at the preacher, (Har Nu Ken!), and the preacher, now dead, turns back into a Goblin.  Finally this convinces the Waits that they are indeed in great danger and they lock themselves in the house.

Meanwhile, Creedence turns herself into a saucy minx and sets about seducing Brent.  For some reason she brings some corn on the cob with her and I must admit my eyes did start to water as I let my imagination run wild.  Fortunately the worst that happens is that whilst Brent and Creedence get all steamy, the corn on the cob turns into pop corn!  I will admit, Creedence is looking mighty fine in this scene and I suspect many a lad popped his corn in the cinema during this part of the movie.

Back at Creedence's chapel, Joshua and Seth set about trying to destroy Creedence and her Goblins and do so in the most boring way possible.  Eating a bologna sandwich and touching a stone.  (The meat eaten by Joshua makes him unappealing as a veggie dish and the touching of the stone, does some sort of magic thingy.  Stop me if this is too technical).  Creedence and the Goblins are no match for processed meat and stone touching and are destroyed.

The world is saved from veggies once more and the Waits head on home.  Joshua's mum celebrates by eating a nice juicy apple, turns into green sludge and is eaten by more Goblins.  Joshua screams 'Stop eating my mommy' and I wet myself laughing.  And so ends one of the worst movies I have ever seen.  And I absolutely loved it!

Yes Wes got it totally right and this movie was right up my, (corn on the cob free), alley.  The acting is terrible, the Goblins look like a bunch of Ewoks going to a austerity Halloween party and the script feels like it was written in crayon.  The fact Troll 2 contains no trolls either is the icing on a 'how to make a movie so bad it becomes good' cake and sets the film up for ridicule from the off.

The blame for this awful film lies in 2 camps, the studio and the director, Claudio Fragasso.

The studio is to blame for the fact that Troll 2 has no trolls as they changed the title of the film.  The movie was originally called Goblins, which makes complete sense, but the studio decided to tie Goblins in with a movie released a few years earlier called Troll.  Fans from the Troll film will then watch Troll 2, they concluded before disappearing up their own backsides.  They were right, Troll fans watched and then wandered out of the movie theatre 10 minutes later once they realised it has sod all to do with Troll.  On the basis of this studios idiocy, I will call my next movie Star Wars: Episode 7.  It has jack all to do with Star Wars but what the hey, (it can't be any worse than Star Wars: Episode 1).

But it is Fragrasso who has to take nearly all of the blame for this fiasco as every other thing which is wrong with the movie, comes back to him.

Let's start with the acting and believe me this will not take long as there is no real acting to talk about.  With the exception of Deborah Reed who is fantastically over the top as baddie Credence and Michael Stephenson who despite being the youngest, gives the most mature performance, the rest of cast feel like they have just turned up on the day and got thrown into the movie.  This is because that is exactly what happened!

George Hardy, (Joshua's dad), for example, was a dentist and turned up expecting to be an extra in the movie!  He is then given one of the largest speaking parts in the movie!  I feel sorry for Hardy as he delivers the lines as if he is reading them for the first time, (he was) and like he is stumbling from scene to scene not knowing what is going on, (he didn't).  Fragasso has obviously not been to the dentist for a while because he would have known that they are simply awful actors.  I can not remember the last time a dentist was a good enough actor to convince me that, 'this isn't going to hurt'.

I don't mean to pick on Hardy, the rest of the cast are just as bad.  Margo Pret, (Joshua's mum), for example, is far more scary than the Goblins for most of the movie.  She stares intently throughout the movie and must be followed by weeping angels as I don't think she ever blinks.  Her lines are also delivered as if she is reading out aloud from the back of a cereal box and she displays as much emotion as a teaspoon.

The poor delivery and performance are not the 'actors' fault, it is Fragasso's.  They did not audition for the roles but nevertheless Fragasso handed them out like flyers for a golf sale.  It reminds me of Guy Goma.  If you do not know who he is, Guy went to the BBC News Channel studios in 2006 to apply for a job but was mistaken for another chap called Guy and ended up being interviewed live on air about the Apple vs Apple court case, (If you would like to see this, here is the link, his face is a picture once he realises what is going on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYg2Z73_KfY. ) I have this vision of all members of the public stumbling onto set asking for directions to the next town but ending up being cast in the movie!

Fragasso spoke little or no English, but wrote the script.  He insisted that the actors stuck to the script and did not stray.  After all, what does a native English speaker know about the English language!  This explains why the cast speak as if reading for the first time and why some sentences don't make sense or are full of grammatical errors.  They don't speak proper like what we does.

The rest of the production team did not speak much English either and communication to the actors was difficult.  This is why in various scenes you will spot the cast members looking directly into or just behind the camera.  They are desperately trying to work out what the flapping arms signal Fragasso is giving actually means.

And then we come onto the Goblins themselves.  Wes and I have a running gag about the bad movies that we have seen so far, in that these bad movies seem to insist on showing clips from way better movies. In Myra Breckingridge, (to pick one at random), there are many clips of good movies, (Laurel and Hardy, for example) and all this does is remind you how bad the actual film you are watching is and how much you actually would rather watch the other film.  Troll 2 has many pictures of Goblins which are far better than the actual Goblins we have on offer.   This is not saying much as a picture of a pile of horse manure would look closer to a Goblin, but does highlight how truly awful the costumes are.

The masks appear to be from a 99p store which are fire damaged and have 99% off the marked price.  It is very obvious that they are masks and not some clever CGI trickery as you can quite clearly see the actors mouths and cheeks behind the mask.  When they do try some animatronics with the Goblins they are painfully slow, for instance, when they are 'talking' the sound is traveling much faster than the mouth and looks like some badly dubbed foreign movie.  It is so bad that it makes Jaws from Jaws The Revenge look like a James Cameron epic.

Thanks to Fragasso's poor casting, awful script and staggeringly bad Goblins, the whole movie feels very cheap.  It truly is a terrible film, but the day Fragasso released it, I hope he also bought a lottery ticket because he has been incredibly lucky and made a film so bad it's good.  Is it the best worst movie ever though?  For me it's in the top 3 definitely.

The recent popularity of Sharktopus, Pirahnaconda or Sharknado on SyFy has shown that there will always be a place for a truly bad movie in our hearts.  That's why Troll 2 quite rightly has a large fan base and why it will continue being some people's best worst movie.  For me, unfortunately, we have another 74 bad movies to watch, so for now I'll have to take a rain check on where this is on my final favourite bad movie list.  I will say though, that if you do get a chance to watch it or if someone offers you the DVD or invites you to a Troll 2 showing, take it, you will not be disappointed.  Also it would be rude not to, after all 'you can't piss on hospitlity'.

#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.