Troll 2 (1990)

I've seen and reviewed more than my fair share of bad movies over the years. But there are a few notoriously bad ones that I've purposely avoided watching. I've spent a lot of time trying to keep movies like Gigli and Battlefield Earth off my personal radar. Their reputations have preceded these movies to the point that I want to stay away from them at all costs.

 

But there's one bad movie out there that I was legitimately afraid to watch. I'd seen a few short clips on YouTube, and those clips were awful enough that I wanted to run and hide at the mere mention of the movie's name. However, when I heard that it would be airing on a local TV station back in January, I had a moment of either courage or stupidity and sat down to watch it. And by the end, I knew then that I had to review it one day so I could share just how crazy it is with others. Referred to by many as "the best worst movie ever made," it is one of those movies that actually does live up to the hype. That movie is Troll 2.

 

The movie focuses on the Waits family, a quartet of dimwits who are preparing for their summer vacation. Said vacation will take them to the tiny rural town of Nilbog, where they'll be swapping homes with a local family for a month. But because this is supposed to be a horror movie, you can pretty much guess that this vacation will end in deep hurting.

 

Joshua (Michael Stephenson) — the youngest member of the family — is visited by the ghost of his dead grandfather (Robert Ormsby), who warns Joshua that he must get his family out of Nilbog as soon as possible. It turns out that the citizens of Nilbog are, in actuality, vegetarian goblins in disguise. These goblins lure people to their town and transform them into plant matter before consuming them. And because he's the least moronic out of his family, Joshua has to be the one to save the day.

 

That's the actual plot of the movie. I wish I was making that up, because there should be no way that a movie like this should exist. It should be some kind of mythical being that people only think they've seen, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. But it's real. I have seen it, been in the same room as it, and witnessed the horrors that appear once the movie begins.

 

I must warn you that there is no un-seeing Troll 2. It's like the evil videotape from The Ring. Once you see it, you can't go back to the way you were before. And until the day I die, I will be among those people whose souls have been forever marked by this tremendous failure. I can't change that. And I am poorer yet simultaneously greater for it.

 

But before we progress any further, I must state that not only do I want this review to be a critique of the movie, but I want it to be a history lesson as well. While the origins of Troll 2 have been told many times by many people, it is a story that I too must tell.

 

The movie began its painful existence as a standalone flick produced under the working title "Goblins." That title would have made more sense, considering that there isn't one single troll in the whole movie. Its distributor eventually gave the movie its official title apparently as a means to connect it to the completely unrelated 1986 movie Troll. It's like if I made a totally original movie about man-eating rabbits with the intention of naming it Killer Bunnies, only to be told that it would be renamed Gremlins 3.

 

It was directed by Claudio Fragasso, working here under his pseudonym, "Drake Floyd." Fragasso is perhaps best known among ultra-devoted B-movies fans as having written a number of Bruno Mattei's Italian exploitation movies. I've seen two of them, and they're really, really bad. But we're here to discuss Troll 2, which is also really, really bad.

 

Under Fragrasso's watch, practically every element of the production falls apart. It's hard to believe that he could not have known just how dreadful the movie would be. Could anyone possibly take Troll 2 seriously? If you do, either you were the guy who made it or you're insane. Hunt down clips on YouTube or do an image search on Google, and you'll see exactly what I mean. You'll turn up with terrible actors, special effects that look like someone bought a ton of dry ice and green Jell-O and decided to build a movie around it, and goblin costumes that are awful beyond comprehension.

 

Holy crap, do those costumes suck. They essentially consist of dwarves dressed up in burlap sacks stuffed with padding, and having them put on cheap rubber masks that look like they were bought at a second-rate Halloween store. It's embarrassing to watch, and I'm sure the little people wearing them were embarrassed too.

 

Speaking of embarrassing, how about that script? Written by Fragasso and Rossella Drudi, it is full of hysterically awful dialogue, idiotic scenes and situations, and as much stupidity as you can cram into one movie. I just cannot begin to fathom what they were thinking when they wrote this.

 

The dialogue is incredibly awkward to say and hear, but it could be because it was written by two people who legitimately did not have a very strong grasp on the English language. But still, that doesn't stop it from being thoroughly awful. A lot of the dialogue makes it sounds like the characters are reading the stage directions from the script or describing what's happening on the screen. There's no way that any actor can make it sound natural.

 

Even if you can overlook the dialogue, everything else is so tremendously stupid that knowing somebody wrote it all down and thought it would make a good movie makes my head hurt. For example, did the goblins need to turn their victims into plant matter before eating them? Aren't man-eating goblins evil enough for a horror movie? I didn't see the need for an anti-vegetarian agenda, personally.

 

Another thing I didn't quite get was the grandfather only appearing to Joshua. He keeps telling the poor kid that he has to do something to get the family out of Nilbog, but how is a ten-year-old kid supposed to do that? You'd think he'd try appearing to the parents too, so that Joshua wouldn't look like he's out of his mind. But the thing is, the grandfather actually shows up in Joshua's sister's mirror at one point, which you'd think would lend credence to Joshua's stories that he'd been talking to a ghost. But nope, they all think that she's on drugs and that Joshua's crazy.

 

And the stupidity doesn't end there! We still have to talk about the acting. The terrible, terrible acting. I'll just say right here that there is not one good performance among the entire cast. Part of that could be blamed on the fact that they were working with a crew who spoke little to no English, and were told to recite their dialogue exactly as it was written in the script. There's no way to get a credible performance out of that, no matter how good an actor you are.

 

But that excuse can only be stretched so far. At some point, you have to admit that the actors just plain suck. And if you've seen so much as one second of Troll 2, you'll agree with me when I say that its cast features some of the worst actors ever captured on film. The vast majority of the people in the movie were amateurs who have only Troll 2 on their IMDB profiles. They're pretty much people who were pulled in off the street and told they were going to be in a movie.

 

Let's use George Hardy, who plays the Waits family patriarch, as an example. He's not a professional actor, but a small-town dentist by trade. It's almost immediately evident that he has no acting experience whatsoever. But he is just so enthusiastic that he makes it hard not to enjoy his scenes. I mean, you can't watch the scene where he delivers one of the movie's more famous lines of dialogue ("You can't piss on hospitality! I won't allow it!") without smiling at just how cheesy it is and how committed Hardy is to the part.

 

But while a blanket statement of "these actors all suck" should be sufficient enough to describe the whole cast, there are a few people I wanted to mention specifically. The first is Margo Prey, who gives off the impression that she was high on something during filming. She looks and sounds totally spaced out, like she's on some other world. It's really weird and off-putting at times, actually.

 

The second performance I wanted to highlight comes from Connie McFarland. It may sound like I'm exaggerating, but McFarland is one of the worst actresses I've ever seen. Her line delivery is dull and lifeless, like she's just blandly reading her dialogue off cue cards instead of saying it like a regular person. Every second she is on the screen is just plain brutal, because she brings absolutely nothing to the table. McFarland is so bad that I can find no way, absolutely no way, to watch Troll 2 without laughing at her.

 

But the one person in the whole movie I wanted to point out the most is Deborah Reed, who plays Creedence Leonore Gielgud, the goblin queen. Yes, that's the character's name. I doubt that there is any actor or actress on Earth who could ever top Reed's overacting here. Not Bruce Campbell, not Reb Brown, not anyone. Her manic performance has to be one of the most insane things ever caught on film. She doesn't just chew the scenery, she chews the whole movie! Reed ends up dominating scenes she's not in. Her overacting is that insane.

 

If bad movies were an army, Troll 2 would be R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. It's the bad movie that other bad movies want to be when they grow up. When I saw it for the first time on that fateful January night I mentioned at the top of the review, I found myself yelling at my television, begging the movie for answers. I just had to know, needed to know how a movie could be so terrible while ultimately being left flabbergasted by the stupidity that comprises each second of its 94-minute running time. But the thing is, unlike a lot of the other wastes of cinema I've reviewed in the past, I cannot actively hate Troll 2. It's just too darn silly to earn the wrath and vitriol that movies like BloodRayne and Manos: The Hands of Fate brought out of me. But it is still one of the worst movies I've ever seen, no doubt about it. Thus, I can give Troll 2 no other rating but one star. It's totally worth seeing if you love bad movies, though.

 

Final Rating: *