Troll 2 (1990)

Media Reviewed: UK DVD (MGM)

Director: Claudio Fragasso
Starring: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey, Connie Young


In my time spent immersing myself in the horror genre I have come across some truly woeful films - horror is characteristically saturated with them. However, a candidate for 'Worst Horror Movie Ever Made' must be Troll 2, a film so bad in every imaginable way that it almost transcends itself and becomes God-like, going about its business in truly mysterious ways that defy human comprehension. A film so mind-bogglingly inept that it has spawned an upcoming documentary, Best Worst Movie, but more on that subject later.

Troll 2, an Italian production using an American setting and cast, is a sequel only in namesake to Troll, the 1986 film directed by special effects wizard John Carl Buechler. In fact, the word Troll is the only thing that the sequel has in common with its predecessor, because this film doesn't feature any trolls. None whatsoever. No, the creatures we are dealing with in this film are goblins. The word troll is not even mentioned in this film once.

However, we can forgive Troll 2 this little misdemeanour for now, as unrelated sequels were a common thing in Italian produced horror movies of the time. A good example of this is La Casa 3; in Italy La Casa (The House) was the name for the Sam Raimi's horror classic The Evil Dead, La Casa 2 was the title for Evil Dead 2, but La Casa 3 was the title for Italian director Umberto Lenzi's Ghosthouse, a tale about a haunted house which has no relevance to the Evil Dead series of films whatsoever. But I digress, the mistitling of this film is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to its failings.

To fully explain the major shortcomings of this film I will have to run through what resembles the plot of the film. It opens with an elderly man name Seth telling his grandson, Joshua, a story about a young man named Peter, who is running away from a group of goblins (who look like a cross between Jimmy Krankie and a potato). Injured, he comes across a young maiden, who cares for him and feeds him a peculiar green substance. What Peter doesn't know is that the maiden is in fact a goblin and the green substance he has just consumed is causing him to perspire a dark green liquid! However, Grandpa Seth insists that the story is real and that goblins still exist. Joshua's mother enters the room, but Grandpa Seth has disappeared. It turns out that he is dead, and that Joshua is seemingly imagining him to be there. These opening scenes, which also include a very eighties style introduction of the daughter, along with some diabolical acting and dialogue suggest to the viewer just what they are in store for.

The family set off to a small country town named Nilbog (if you haven't worked out the groan-inducing plot device already, you will) in order to swap houses with a family who intend to spend some time in the city. However, Joshua senses that there's something not quite right about this suspicious looking family. Joshua's family haven't seemed to noticed, as the father is pleased by what he calls "good country hospitality" when he notices the food that they have laid out for them on the dinner table. However, all of the food is covered in some kind of strange green substance. This leads on to one of the most memorable scenes in the film in which the ghost of Grandpa Seth stops time for thirty seconds in order for Joshua to urinate on the food so that his family cannot eat it. I'm not lying.

The rest of the film involves Joshua trying to convince his family that the people of Nilbog are in fact goblins ("It's goblin spelled backwards!"), a bizarre family sing-along of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, a cringeworthy subplot involving the daughter's attempt to make her boyfriend give up his friends, a magical stone from Stonehenge, possibly the weirdest love scene ever to be put on celluloid involving massive amounts of popcorn, the true power of a double-decker bologna sandwich and possibly the worst delivery of a line in any film ever made in the infamous "Oh my God!" scene:




In fact, it would take an article twice this length to fully explain the large number of staggeringly odd events that occur in the film and besides, I would be spoiling it for you.

Would I say that Troll 2 is the worst horror film ever made? Possibly, although it does have The Exorcist 2 to contend with. It is certainly a film that is 'so-bad-it's-good' as it entertained me whilst I waited anxiously for the next inane line of dialogue, or bad piece of acting, or inexplicable plot point (and I didn't ever have to wait long). This film draws more unintentional laughs than possibly any other film I have ever seen, so therefore I would have to wholeheartedly recommend it to any fan of bad movies, or anyone with a morbid curiosity about how bad films really can be.

It's this unintentional comedy that has given the film its cult following and spawned a documentary. Best Worst Movie is directed by Michael Paul Stephenson, the child actor who played the lead role in Troll 2. It reunites many of the original cast and discusses the films low budget roots, the cult following it garnered and the subsequent effect it has had on many of the cast's lives.