As the end of September rolls around, most people are excited for October to begin and at least in my opinion, the best holiday, Halloween, is here again. Now, apart from the decorations and the overall feel of the middle part of fall, one of the best parts has to be the scary movies that EVERY station has to be showing. However, potentially the best film and one of personal favorite horror films is the negatively reviewed but immensely popular cult film, Troll 2.
Troll 2 was released in 1990 by Italian Director Claudio Fragasso, the film is noted as being one of the worst films ever made. So bad in fact, a much more successful documentary was produced by the former actors titled “The Best Worst Movie” which dealt with the absolute shit show that was Troll 2. With a low budget of only 200,000 dollars and an impassable language barrier between the first time actors and the Italian speaking director, the film was doomed from the start.
Essentially, a young boy and his family leave their home in the suburbs to switch houses for a week with a family from a small country town called Nilbog. Their son Joshua, warned by the ghost of his dead grandfather is hesitant to go but eventually forced by his family wherein they are assaulted from all sides by vegetarian goblins. I can’t make this up.
If you haven’t ever watched the film, it’s a staggering 94 minutes of the most bizarre and hilarious cinema ever devised. Even from the film’s title itself the movie is wrong. The 2 denotes that the film is a sequel to something which it is not; there was never a troll 1 relating to anything, and the only film with the title was about something else.
The film contains multitudes of errors on every level of production from writing and composition of the set, to the filming itself and the dialogue. Casual and veteran film-goers alike can enjoy the sheer awful creation heralded at the tail end of the 80’s monster movie. The trolls –and if you were careful enough to observe, though the movie is called “troll 2” there are no trolls- wear potato sacks and wear melted Halloween masks. Several scenes show that the film crew forgot at what time of day they were filming as in the same scene it will switch between day and night with no one commenting on it. In another instance, Joshua's grandfather freezes time (makes sense in context, not really.) but the family can still be seen blatantly moving as I can imagine Fragasso just telling them not to move.
The acting is what really sells the film for me, however. Every line delivered by EVERY single character sounds like they’re delivered by a comatose patient recently woken up and spoken as though in a haze. In this scene, Joshua’s grandfather assists in killing a goblin disguised as a preacher by lighting him on fire to distract the other goblins from killing Joshua’s family. Just, fucking everything about it, the kids face, the dad’s delivery, the fact the preacher kind of looks like Michael Jackson from the back, it’s all great.
The film is rife with other random and downright strange moments including and of course, not limited to.
A girl melting into the most poorly hidden trap door ever.
Creepy storekeepers who only sell milk.
(In particular, I enjoyed the interview they conducted with this actor as he said he provided the scenes before he even knew what the film actually was.)
A sex scene involving popcorn.
And a series of truly terrible facial expressions.
If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing this film, I'd highly recommend getting a few friends together to share in this soon to be favorite piece of cinema.
