In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, an early fave Troll 2 gets its green, gloopy just desserts, featuring some of the worst-delivered dialogue of all time.
In a sweeping, gracious shift from my negativity last month, today I’m focusing on the platonic ideal of a bad movie. An infamously crap production that feels like a big, sloppy hug. A sequel that has practically nothing in common with its predecessor (which features both an embarrassing small role from Julia Louis Dreyfus and a protagonist named Harry Potter). It may just be the first bad movie that I ever fell in love with.
Troll 2 is baffling and unintentionally hilarious in all the right ways, with its all-timer terrible line readings and horror moments bunged up with litres of creamy green goo. I can’t recommend it enough, and the good news here is that if you can’t bear to sit through it, the film’s child star (Michael Stephenson) made his own doco, Best Worst Movie, encapsulating all that beautiful awfulness in a more palatable non-fiction memoir format. Then again, what are you doing reading this column if you can’t handle a film like this?
In spite of its title, Troll 2 centres on a town of human-eating goblins living in the cleverly named town of Nilbog. Taking a page out of The Princess Bride, we open on Grandpa Seth (Robert Ormsby) telling young Joshua Waits (Stephenson) a fantasy yarn: about little people in burlap sacks and derpy masks, who turn their victims into vegetal green goo and then feast upon them. Thing is, Grandpa Seth is actually dead, and appears as a guardian spirit to Joshua to warn the Waits family away from Nilbog, where the eerie critters disguised as eerie townsfolk yearn to turn the whole clan into Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards slime.
Italian B-movie director and madman Claudio Fragasso landed on the concept because all of his friends were becoming vegetarians and it really annoyed him. In later years he’s claimed that the ensuing chaos was always intended to be comedic, a la The Room‘s Tommy Wiseau, but that’s about as unbelievable as any exposition delivered by druid witch Creedence Leonore Gielgud (Deborah Reed, MVP) and her wicked powers derived from “Stonehenge Magic Stone”.
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The first truly transcendent scene occurs when Joshua and his family arrive at their shabby holiday home to find a full table of goop-covered food waiting for them. The kid is told he must stop his family from eating the tainted banquet, and his first idea is to stand above the meal and rain piss all over it. Dad George (Michael Hardy) sends Joshua to his room and throws him on the bed, bellowing that he “can’t piss on hospitality!”
Then he takes off his belt. “What are you going to do to me, daddy?”, Joshua cries, and our mind lands on a few unsavoury options: is he going to belt the kid? Is he going to piss on him in an act of retaliation? The answer is completely unpredictable: he’s merely “tightening [his] belt one loop so that [he doesn’t] feel hunger pains.” Phew.
For a creature feature with some yucky practical effects stuff in store, Troll 2 is majestic because these filler scenes of family drama and stakes-raising are just as bizarre as any of the more spectacular horror stuff. It becomes impossible to choose who your favourite performer within the cooked family unit is, from Margo Prey’s glassy-eyed mum to Connie McFarland’s breathtakingly overwrought and awkward acting as bratty sister Holly.
Early on, Prey tries to calm her terrified son by asking him to sing that song she likes so much, and he reluctantly starts reciting “Row Row Row Your Boat”: one of a million instances of mind-boggling misunderstanding of human connection and regular familiar interaction, the kind that I come to bad movies for.
Darren Ewing, as dweeby stowaway Arnold, gets the movie’s best-known moment when he witnesses a pack of goblins devouring a bodacious townie babe. “They’re eating her,” he realises far too late, “and then they’re going to eat me.” As the camera pulls in close on his face, an uncredited extra (a housefly) crawls across his forehead, and he yells with iconic flatness: “oh my god!” The irony is that he doesn’t end up being goblin food, instead getting turned into a man-tree and then chainsawed by a well-meaning pal.
This year, there is apparently another, unrelated Troll 2 arriving on Netflix, from the director of Norwegian disaster movie The Wave. Disrespectful. I will not be tuning in, because I already have the best possible Troll 2 on DVD and feel a rush of warm delirium whenever I rewatch it. This was a movie that earned me some infamy as a tween, since I would forcibly screen it for every schoolmate who made the mistake of coming to my house. Don’t make me do the same to you: seek out Fragasso’s demented anti-veg propaganda film yourself.
