It's good that we finally get to see a larger scope of the world set up in the first movie of the Troll series. While Troll hardly left the small San Francisco apartment building that Harry Potter and family lived in, save to explore the home dimension of the titular Troll, Torok, we now get to see what the other members of Torok's race are doing, out in Utah. It seems that Torok was hardly the only evil Troll--the Trolls of Troll 2 are nothing if not even more evil than Torok, subjecting their victims to forcible transformation by way of their stomachs. Sure, Torok turned people into plants against their will, but at least he just had the plants take over their apartment and turn them that way. These Trolls make you eat their gross food, and then you undergo transformation--apparently a rather painful process. Trust me, I have a digestive disorder, and there's nothing worse than intestinal torment. Torok is now seemingly the least evil of these Trolls. I would be concerned about this series gaining spectacle creep in the evil of its villains, but the third and fourth entries in the series were breather episodes. Joe D'Amato, who produced Troll 2, took his first crack at making a Troll 3 with Quest for the Mighty Sword, which focused largely on his recurring character of Prince Ator, dwelling only briefly on Trolls like Grindel, who were presumably the ancestors of the Trolls from the last two films. Troll 3 aka The Crawlers was even softer on continuity, just showing a bunch of killer trees that were probably animated by the plant-magic of Torok and the Nilbog Trolls from this film. Sure, they talk about "radiation" in The Crawlers, but they wouldn't market it as Troll 3 if the story from the first two films didn't have some influence on it.
There are no other jokes that one can make about Troll 2.
Bad movies have had a curious history. You look at them at the very dawn of cinema and you find that "poorly made" was often considered synonymous with "offensive." Not offensive in the sense of having one's intellect offended, by a lack of effort or whatever, but offensive in the way that movies like The Birth of a Nation offend us today. (The 1915 Birth of a Nation, fucking duh.) One of the first famous "worst movies ever" was No Orchids for Miss Blandish, which, surprisingly, is more boring than anything else. Yes, there is an implied rape scene, which would be pretty intense for 1948. Yes, the American accents in the mouths of British actors are awful. But people hated this largely-tedious film just because it was poorly made. As time went on, people began to grow softer on these movies, only taking their awfulness seriously if they did something actually offensive on top of being a pile of shit (like Myra Breckinridge making fun of rape). I would argue that sometimes this offensiveness comes be derived from resource abuse, like any number of movies that have devoured many millions of dollars and still turned out awful (like Pluto Nash). The '50s and especially the '60s mark when we began to cuddle up to films made by the likes of William Castle and Roger Corman that were fun even if they weren't expressions of the arts, maybe because it was okay for the medium to open a little bit--the studio environment had changed, in any case. Postmodernism also started building around that time, and that's clearly informed the modern sensibility of enjoying these films ironically. Postmodernism's virtue of self-awareness allowed us to begin constructing a bad movie "canon" of sorts, which is basically this Wikipedia page. These are the Bad Movies, separate usually from the Trash Movies, which are typically lower-key affairs.
The Bad Movies are usually hard to talk about because everyone has already said everything about them. I can't even write a bogus intro like the one I started this review with, because inevitably someone will twist that around to assume the joke was that I was "trolling" you. The joke of that intro, in any case, is predicated on knowing that the Troll movies have nothing to do with one another. And now I've allowed myself to be trapped in the old "explaining the joke" bit, as a consequence. It's Troll 2: group of white people, the Waits family, go on a house swap with a family in the rural town of Nilbog. Young Joshua Waits has visions of his dead Grandpa Seth, who warns him that Nilbog is the Kingdom of the Goblins, an evil race of beings who trick people into consuming food that turns them into plants, which the goblins then eat, since they are vegetarian as well as man-eaters. Grandpa Seth is absolutely correct about this backwater berg--the weird, creepy inhabitants of Nilbog, with their weird, creepy birthmarks and weird, creepy vegetarianism, swiftly act weird and creepy to the Waits clan, as well as a group of young men who have also traveled to Nilbog because one of them, Elliot, is dating Waits daughter Holly. The goblins are led by Credence Leonore Gielgud, the queen of overacting, whose first scene has that "Oh my Gooooood" thing that the Internet is obsessed with. In the end, it takes the power of family, and meat, to defeat the goblins...or is it?!?
It has been quite a few years since I've heard tell of any sort of follow-up to this movie. That's probably for the best. Within the events of that relatively short synopsis, we have the oddities and madness that have now become famous: the "oh my Goooood" scene. The corn-cob scene. The scene where Joshua pisses on his family's food, and, presumably, his family. The dialogue, every word of it, and how it is delivered, up to and including, "You can't piss on hospitality." Troll 2 is one of those movies that I have watched or been forced to watch innumerable times--it's almost certainly in my Top Five Most Watched. I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate about thirty times, Don't Go in the Woods around twenty-five, and Troll 2 in the same ballpark. None of those movies are ones I ever get sick of. My forced repeat viewings of Sharknado and Birdemic don't share that fondness. There's a certain spark of something that motivates those other three movies more than those two outliers. I assume that this spark is called "effort."
What matters about the number of times that I've seen Troll 2 is that I still notice new stuff about it all the time. And what's more, I've rewatched it after finally seeing the limits of Claudio Fragasso's astonishing scripting, a la Women's Prison Massacre, SS Girls, Hell of the Living Dead, and Zombi 3. In my most recent viewing, where I got to have the best Troll 2 experience of all--showing it to someone who's never heard of it before--I noticed that Dad Waits dismisses Elliot's relationship with his daughter on the grounds that Elliot is a "good-fer-nuthing." Much later in the film, Grandpa Seth condemns Dad Waits, because even in death he's still angry a "good-fer-nuthing" married his daughter. That adds a little extra depth to the dynamic of the family, because it suggests that Elliot and Holly may have a future together against the odds, just like Holly's parents. The young couple are a little charming as characters, although they're also poorly-acted. But lines like the ones they share with each other, shows that even sans Bruno Mattei, Fragasso has still got it. "If my dad knew you were here, he'd cut off your LIIITLE nuts and eat them!" That's gold, right there.
Troll 2, like The Room, is the Valley of the Dolls of our generation. Having now also seen Valley of the Dolls, I can sense that familiar vibe. I dunno--there really is just something in all of us that likes watching an art medium get mutilated. Sometimes in the most boring way possible. Zing! Take that, Valley of the Dolls, and also you, Birdemic. Troll 2 is comfortable and cozy, and what's more, it feels like a single unified thing. You can drink in all the details and have an excellent time in the process without having to wait for this scene or that scene or hoping that someone grabs a coat-hanger again. (That's a Birdemic reference, not a Valley of the Dolls one, ass.) It's a bright, colorful film, and it's well-directed. There are some impressive or at least amusing effects, and the scenes are imaginative. Hell, the premise is wonderfully imaginative. Directors: use your wives' ideas. Especially if she hates vegetarians.
I don't even know how to end this review. If you've never seen Troll 2, see it, in the same way that you would see The Shining or Suspiria or whatever for the first time. Kiss up on it a little, and vice versa.
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