The review: After watching Troll 2, which definitely falls under that
obfucious category known as "bad film," our minds couldn't help but wander
to the folks at Impossible Foods,
who are working hard to bring the world a viable, delicious, and visually
appealing hamburger made entirely of plants. An idea whose time has come — if
not due to ethical reasons, then ecological ones — and which, if successful, would
make the eating of specific kinds of "meat" more palatable to many
people, both carnivore and herbivore.
But probably not to the nefarious vegetarians in this surreally
incompetent horror comedy, who pursue a harebrained path inverse to that of Impossible
Foods: the heinous herbivores of Troll 2 want to convert a living, breathing
human family into green, visually unappealing plant goo — their favorite food. (Actually:
they don't just want to do it, they can.)
As inferred by the film's title, the baddies of this evil-vegetarians
movie are fantastical creatures: a gaggle of green-goo-gorging goblins who,
when they so desire, can take the form of the salt of America: the rural small farmer.
(Duplicitous rural farmers, deformed killer vegetarians — Troll 2 was obviously
made by an urban carnivore with an axe to grind and leaves viewers with no
doubt: vegetarianism is evil, vegetarians are monsters, and eating food from vegetarians
will kill you. Ergo: meat good.)
That nary a troll is seen in Troll 2 is because the movie
was made under the title Goblins, and gained its final misleading moniker only to
ride on the popularity of an earlier, unrelated fantasy movie entitled Troll
(1986 / trailer).
Thus, though there are no trolls, goblins appear often — and even reappear
after being killed. (Face it, unlike with the rural small farmer, you can't
keep a good goblin down.) There's an evil witch, too, not to mention a
multitude of shiny, perfectly shaped, delicious-looking red apples even more
beautiful than the one seen in Disney's Snow White (1937 / trailer)... and we all know
what happened to Snow White when she ate that apple.
Troll 2 is, basically, an anti-vegetarian fairytale set in contemporary
times (if one can still view 1990 as contemporary). And much how logic never
plays a role in fairytales, logic is nowhere to be found in Troll 2. (So don't
bother asking why vegetarians would want to convert living human flesh into
plant goo — it's just what they do.) Indeed, to say that Troll 2 is simply bonkers
would be a bit of an understatement, but what is not an understatement is that regardless
of one's own personal nutritive proclivities, this jaw-dropping fantasy film is
immensely entertaining in a so-bad-its-good way.
Which is not to say that it's a family movie. True, there's
no exploitive nudity, and the blood and gore loses much of its punch by being
bright leaf-lettuce green, but much like the off-screen death of Bambi's mother
in Disney's Bambi (1942 / trailer),
some on-screen events in Troll 2 could give an impressionable child nightmares.
Non-impressionable people, however, will probably burst out laughing — we did,
often, spilling our bag of 100% organic beet chips everywhere in the process.
(But at least we didn't spill our 100% vegan beer.*)
* An impossibility, actually. Vegan beer, that is. Not to forget the dried fish bladder — isinglass — used to filter most beer, even when not used the
legally permitted amount of aphids per serving of hops (3,500 per 10 grams of hops)
guarantees that there will always be bug remnants in the batch of beer. Thus, in all likelihood no
beer is truly vegan.
In an obvious nod to another more famous fantasy film, The
Princess Bride (1987 / trailer),
Troll 2 opens with a granddad (Robert Ormsby) reading a fairytale to his
grandson (Michael Paul Stephenson). Within this sequence, we learn from the
appearance of the evil goblins — i.e., vertically challenged people wearing potato
sacks and cheap masks — that the makeup and effects of the movie are hilarious,
and the acting truly noteworthy. The acting of the woman playing the mother
(Margo Prey), for example, is so vacuous one could imagine she is addicted to
Valium, while the thespianism of the previously mentioned wicked witch (Deborah
Reed) transcends terribleness to become a persiflage of bad acting, something
that a talented actor probably couldn't do even if they tried.
Oh, yeah: we also learn that the granddad is actually dead,
and that no other family member can see him — at least, that is, unless it's
advantageous to the plot that someone suddenly can.
And while the basic plot is relatively simple ("evil
vegetarian vs. good meat-eater"), it is also far more meanderingly linear than
it is coherent. Throughout the movie, characters are confronted with events that
would cause most people to think WTF and backpedal, but those in the movie
react as if it's totally normal and slog onward. Your TV suddenly starts
playing a muzak variation of You Can Leave Your Hat On and shows a
babalicious brunette dancing up to your trailer? Totally normal. A friendly
sheriff gives you a green hamburger to eat? Totally normal. You see a girl
running in terror through the forest so you football tackle her to talk with her?
Totally normal. Your young son urinates all over the food on the kitchen table
so you lock him in his room and go without anything to eat for 24 hours?
Totally normal. You make out with a babalicious brunette and an ear of corn and
suddenly popcorn floods the room? Totally normal. Troll 2 plays out in a world
where about the only thing that fazes anybody, if but for seconds, is the
appearance of a ghost — who, when needed, can appear with a Molotov cocktail
and fire extinguisher in hand. (Like: totally normal.)
Since its initial release, Troll 2 has gained substantial cult
popularity as a "bad movie." It's a deserved reputation, as seldom
has there been a worse movie that flies by as enjoyably and quickly as this 135-minute-long
jewel of junkiness. Produced with all the quality of a low-grade TV movie, Troll
2 is so full of thespian faux pas, inanity, and incongruent story development
that on occasion it comes across like the intellectually impaired prodigal great-great-great
grandson of Dali & Bunuel's surrealist short, Un chien andalou
(1929).
Troll 2, of course, lacks any of the artistic, intellectual,
social, religious, or Freudian insight and criticism of that classic short, but
for that Troll 2 is far funnier. It is well worth noting that unlike Dali &
Bunuel's film, if not most films in general, any and all positive aspects of Troll
2 are purely accidental in origin. It is one of those rare movies — like Dwain
Esper's Maniac
(1934 / trailer),
Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda (1953 / trailer),
Harold P. Warren's Manos, The Hands of Fate (1966 / trailer),
or George Barry's Death Bed: The Bed that Eats (1977 / scenes)
— in which the combined inabilities of all those involved coalesce to produce
something almost transcendental, almost otherworldly, in nature.
Troll 2 is truly unique cinematic experience, and a
masterpiece of bad, anti-vegetarian cinema. Watch it with a friend, carnivore
or vegetarian: jaws will drop, laughter will ring, and a good time will be had
by all.
Post-Hermann's addendum: That Trolls 2 is as superlatively awful
and uniquely entertaining should probably not be all that surprising, seeing
that the director and co-scripter of the fabulous freak of a feature length film, "Drake Floyd", is
actually the sadly underappreciated and superbly anti-talented Italian genre
filmmaker Claudio Fragasso, a man whose auteur sensibilities and filmic (in)abilities
rival those of the great Italian anti-filmmaker Bruno Mattei (30 July 1931 – 21
May 2007; see: Island of the Living [2006]), a man with whom Fragasso often worked. The plethora of wonderfully
questionable filmic flotsam that Fragasso has touched as credited and/or
uncredited writer, co-writer, director, co-director, producer, co-producer or
even as actor includes but is hardly limited to: Hell of the Living Dead (1980 /
trailer),
Zombi 3 (1988 / trailer),
The Seven Magnificent Gladiators (1983, trailer),
with Lou "Muscles" Ferrigno & Sybil "Love Pillows" Danning,
Zombi 4: After Death (1988, trailer),
with porn legend Jeff "The Whooper" Stryker, Monster Dog (1984, music video),
with Alice "Republican" Cooper, The Nun of Monza (1980 / trailer),
Terminator 2: Shocking Dark (1989 / trailer),
Interzone (1987 / trailer),
starring Bruce "Mr. Linda Hamilton Kathleen Quinlan" Abbott, of The Re-Animator (1985), The Other Hell (1981 / trailer),
Caged Women (1982 / trailer)
and Women's Prison Massacre (1983 / trailer),
both with Laura "Yummy" Gemser, Robowar (1988 / trailer),
Rats – Night of Terror (1984 / trailer),
La Casa 5: Beyond Darkness (1990 / trailer),
Scalps (1987 / trailer),
Mania (1974 / trailer)
and so much more. That his likewise uniquely talented wife and regular collaborator
on scripts, Rossella Drudi, also helped write Trolls 2 probably also helped make this marvelously terrible movie what it is.
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