The Revenge of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 29 - Troll 2

Ye Gods what an awful film. Mind numbingly bad awful and just well bad to the bloody bone is this picture. It’s one of the rare moments in film where NOTHING is done right.

The story of how this 1990 film got made is almost as weird as the film itself – the director and his wife put together a screen play for an English language film – however neither of them spoke English very well if at all – somehow and I have no idea how they got the money to bring an Italian film crew to Utah to film this- they grabbed some people most of whom had never acted in films before (indeed one of them was a patient at a mental hospital at the time this was a sort of work release deal for him) and started shooting – and the resultant train wreck is the stuff of movie legend. Horrific movie legend but legend none the less.

The – plot – sorry kept trying to think of another word but it doesn’t come to me – concerns the family Waits – Dad, Mom, Holly, and young Joshua go on a vacation where they switch houses with a family who lives in the town of Nilbog (Goblin spelled backwards) which is as one would assume given the name of the town – filled with goblins – in fact the towns folks are Goblins in disguise!

The family is fairly hateful – Mom and Dad are idiots – Dad is an angry idiot – Holly is a sort of mean girl the older sister who is having problems with her boyfriend who is an idiot ( I keep using that word – it fits) who seems to be happier to hang with his buds than be with her. The movie needs cannon fodder, boyfriend and buds supply that.

And then there is Joshua – Joshua is an unpleasant child, he has a very whiney voice, is always sweating and just grates on you – several writers have noted he looks like he’s constipated the whole picture and that fits. He also talks to his dead grandfather – something that causes the family some grief.

We first see the dead grandfather he is scaring the bejesus out of Joshua by telling him a story about goblins who turn people into plants and then eat them (yes this is odd, we’ll get to why in a moment) at first we don’t know he’s dead and we wonder why the hell is he terrifying the child like this – later we find out he’s dead and only Joshua can see him – the afterlife has a lot of rules that we don’t know about I guess – this kind of sucks for Joshua because grandpa keeps putting him in bad situations.

Speaking of which when they arrive in the creepy half abandoned town , followed by boyfriend and buds in a Winnebago looking thing – one of the evil towns folk – Creedence the lady druid serves them all sorts of green food – which per the warning of the dead grandfather to Josh will turn them into plants and food for the goblins. Gramps has stopped time to tell him but He, Josh, has to stop them from eating somehow.

Now no doubt you’ve noticed that for a movie called Troll 2 there have been very few mentions of trolls. That is because there are not trolls As a marketing device the film, original entitled something like Goblins – surprise that is – was named Troll 2 to link it with a marginally successful film Troll by the same company. Hence Troll 2 with no trolls.

So back Josh – who, in one of the films infamous scenes, unable to think of any other way to stop them from chowing down on this awful looking stuff, pees on the food. WE don’t see that – thank god for small mercies - the idea is bad enough.

The family and the boys discover that the only thing to eat in this town is some sort of green milk – which soon turns one of the boys into a plant and as he changes he notices the goblins chowing down and in about the worst bit of acting by a human being about to be eaten by Goblins after being turned into a plant starts saying “oh my god. Oh my god.” In a manner that has to be heard to be believed. The you tube clip of this has had over 4 million hits.

Let’s just take this moment to address the turning into plants thing – part of the underlying lunacy of this film is at the time the director’s wife was writing the screen play several people she knew had become vegetarians and for some reason this irked her no end – she felt they were being smug about it or some such so the goblin where intended to be a satire on vegetarians. No I don’t know how it was supposed to work it just didn’t - but it forms part of the weird undercurrents that float around this film – food seems rather disgusting – except for a bologna sandwich that towards the end of the film which repels goblins like garlic does vampires. It’s a strange and stupid movie.

And the other thing about the script – since it was written by folks who did not speak English the words come out a bit odd – the actors while they were filming tired to say ‘no Americans don’t talk like that’ but the director insisted.

The director by the way is a lunatic – what a surprise that is – apparently at a cast reunion question and answer period he crashed the party and had to be escorted out and continued to yell at them in the hallway. He is convinced he directed a masterpiece. Well he did but not in the way he thought.

Once the masks as it were of the Goblins are removed the film becomes a series of stand offs, captures, escapes and chases where in the end the goblins are defeated – not before one of the other cannon fodder fellows has been seduced by the druid lady using corn on the cob as a sex lure. He is then drowned in popcorn. This movie has issues with food.

And of course the goblin costumes are all stiff masks that look pretty damn fake.

There is a stinger ending that makes no real movie sense but makes sense considering how awful the rest of the film has been.

This is a truly bad film – with this underlying food phobia and nastiness towards vegetarians that just is just bloody weird.

Enjoy with veggies and ranch dip -