Troll 2 (1990_ In all of the bizarre, hilarious backstories surrounding this monumentally terrible movie, nobody, to my knowledge ever explained or answered one basic, burning question.....
Why oh why did shlock Italian director Claudio Fragasso and his co-writer Rosella Drudi shlep an Italian film crew to the middle of effin' nowhere in Utah to make a ludicrous ultra low budget horror movie?
Sounds like a recipe for disaster, huh? Or at the very least, one hell of a strange movie.
All of the above came true, resulting in a film so relentlessly nonsensical and unintentionally side-splitting, it became the stuff of legend......and embraced by fanboys and fangirls as a cult disasterpiece.....a perfect storm of awfulness equal to the worst (or best) of Ed Wood Jr. and Herschel Gordon Lewis, deficient in virtually every single element that goes into making a film.
Fragasso, speaking no English whatsoever at the time, cast the film with Utah locals....with the leading man played by town dentist George Hardy, a genial, stagestruck hunk who looked like a throwback to a 1950's star of B-movies.
Once assembled, this cast of rank amateur were confounded by Fragasso and Drudi's script, clumsily translated into a kind of broken English that would never come out of any English speaking person's mouth. They begged the director to let them ad-lib the script's gibberish into something approaching real American dialogue but he forbid it.......thereby turning every clownish line spoken into an instant hall-of-fame howler.
That fractured Italian-ese imitation English contributed to what made the film so cherished and embraced by cultists.....watching low grade community theater actors delivering stilted, convoluted dialogue guaranteed to make a crowd burst into laughter
But as I said, the acting and dialogue were only the beginning of what went wrong here.....the storyline itself, about a family who falls prey to a town full of goblins, approached almost deliriously stratospheric heights of utter lunacy......and unplanned for hilarity.
I could attempt describing sequences in this film, but you'd really need to see them to believe them......such as the vegetarian goblins reducing their human victims into huge puddles of green goo for easier digestion......or the human family's 10 year old child traumatizing the monsters by eating a double bologna sandwich in front of them......or most remembered, dentist-actor George Hardy's immortal rant to his little boy after the kid's urinated on the family's Goblin-poisoned meal, ...."You can't piss on hospitality! I won't allow it!"
No, I swear I'm not making any of this up.......it's all there on film.....green goo, horny teen boys turned into potted plants, a crazed, eye-bugging witch, dwarf Goblins and costumes designed by, of all people, Laura Gemser, the exotic Indonesian sex goddess of softcore Euro-Trash like "Black Emanuelle".
The overall effect of this onslaught of absurdity made the film look like it was made by visiting aliens......but not the kind from Italy.....I meant by visitors from another planet altogether.
Initially greeted with the derision it practically begged for, "Troll 2" became graced with cinematic serendipity......as bad as it was (and we're talkin' off the scale levels of badness) the film was strangely a joy to sit through....and nobody even cared that the film had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the first "Troll" movie...the title being nothing but a ploy by a studio's marketing department.
Bottom line: "Troll 2" was hot sauce, five alarm hoot, an off-the-rails experience like no other.
And I can vouch for that and well understand how it took its place along side of "Rocky Horror Picture Show" and "Pink Flamingoes" as one of cult moviegoers' favorite midnight guilty pleasures. There's not minute of it that 's boring, and there's an innocent purity to its unabashed complete lack of even bare minimum filmmaking skills. It's a movie that exists supremely within its own daffy universe of crazy. How can you do anything but applaud appreciatively for this odd collection of people trying so hard to entertain you?
For mainstream cinema viewers, it goes without saying that you shouldn't come anywhere near this film.....for you folks, it could never be anything but a Zero (0) star.
But for those of us (BQ included) who seek out and clutch misbegotten films like this near and dear to our hearts, it's forever and always a favored 4 star (****) trainwreck.
But the long strange journey of "Troll 2" wasn't over after the film's release. 19 years later came "Best Worst Movie" (2009) detailing the sometimes riotous, sometimes weird and sometimes bittersweet and sad history of the film and all its participants.....more on that one tomorrow!
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