Troll 2 (1990)
There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they’re unwatchable. There are movies that are so bad they’re good again. Troll 2 isn’t the worst movie ever made (though it's a contender) but it might be one of the best bad movies you’ll ever see. You’ve probably seen Darren Ewing’s delivery of “They’re eating her... and then they’re going to eat me! OH MY GAWWWWD!” a hundred times. It still won’t prepare you for how genuinely awful, and simultaneously awesome the film is.
Unsurprisingly, this bad sequel has little to do with the first film. In fact, the two are completely unrelated. Our heroes are a typical family: Dad (George Handy), Mom (Margo Prey), teenage daughter Holly (Connie McFarland) and the youngest son Joshua (Michael Stephenson) - along with their ghostly grandfather (Robert Ormsby) whom only Joshua can see - travels to the strange town of Nilbog. There, they find themselves the prey of goblins. There are no trolls in this movie. The goblins are vegetarians so their goal is first to transform the family into plants, and THEN eat them!
The writing is awful, and I don’t only mean the dialogue. We’ve got ample scenes where characters talk like aliens who only have a vague idea of what English sounds like, transplanted in a nonsense plot. The production is lousy. You could get better costumes at any half-decent costume shop for less than 50 bucks. The special effects? pathetic. One recurring illusion, a bolt of lightning representing the magical powers of several characters, appears to be a drawing on a black background. The actors are all terrible, to the point where I don’t know if even a talented director could've gotten animated performances out of them. I can't say for sure, however, as the directing is some of the worst I’ve ever seen.
I was worried that having heard so much about the movie ahead of time would spoil Troll 2 for me. It didn't. This movie is the best kind of bad movie. It's consistently bad, but always in new ways. The special effects and the acting are shoddy from the beginning, but the ways and number of times it discovers to get even worse will surprise you. Knowing the plot cannot prepare you for just how nutty it is. So many elements come out of nowhere, are unexplained or lead to logical questions, and are then handled so badly that by the time the movie's over, you're overwhelmed. I tried to list my favorite parts. The list kept getting longer and longer. There’s so much bad in this movie that a single sitting isn't enough. The clips you’ve seen everywhere on Youtube become notorious out of luck. Nearly every scene in the film has something that could've become a meme. And if you thought the sequence would get better in context, or that it wouldn’t be as bad as it is clipped out and played on its own, you're wrong.
There’s a ton of re-watch value in Troll 2. You'll catch new things every time you see it, and it’s the kind of movie you want to share with unsuspecting victims just to see their priceless reactions. If you’re not one for watching movies ironically, this is the one that'll get you hooked on the “bad movie” genre. You can’t really be prepared for Troll 2. I mean this in the best way. (On DVD, November 21, 2014)
