For Whom the Bull Trolls (Pt. 2): Happily, If Not Reluctantly, Lost in Nilbog

Part of the problem of writing about films that have gained a large amount of notoriety is that they have achieved exactly that. Choose any movie title commonly believed or widely held to be of the truly atrocious variety, then go just about anywhere on the Intranets, and it becomes rather easy to find two primary reactions to that film.

The first is of the "that movie sucked my will to live" type, wherein the attempted reviewer will cast the film onto a bonfire of hatred that will invariably include a brace of curse words, appeals for "wanting my money back," and/or a declaration that the reviewer has now realized that there are now that many less minutes in their all-too-brief lifespan that they will never get back, generally corresponding directly to the running time of said film, though usually rounded off at either 90 minutes or two hours.

The second reaction, related only to the first in determination, is of a far more optimistic vein, though still angled as a back-handed compliment: "This film is --" (you know what's coming) " -- SO BAD, IT'S GOOD."

I once met someone who held the second reaction regarding Citizen Kane. Their take was that the film, completing writing off both its overall excellence in filmmaking technique and its massive influence both upon its release in 1941 and through the then-50 years hence, was too broadly done to be taken seriously, and that it was ham-handed and obvious in its every scene. But, they then attempted to soothe my swiftly bubbling-over contempt for their opinion that it was Kane's very campiness that still made it enjoyable. In essence, they were adopting the "so bad, it's good" stance. I would have felt, had it been one of my closer, sharper friends, that this person were merely trying to put one over on me. But this person, thankfully no longer of my acquaintance, was a dullard of spectacular proportions, and I held their every opinion on every subject imaginable to be circumspect, if not outright unremarkable or foolish. I still truly believe, given the knowledge of the remainder of their mouth-breathing diatribes, that this person meant every word of their take on Kane.

I have nothing but contempt for the first reaction detailed above. It, and all elements of it described in the paragraph, reveals nothing but wish fulfillment on the part of the "reviewer" to not take control of their own actions. They put the onus on the film for ruining their time, taking their money, sucking their will, and shortening their existence by how ever much they determine. They apparently didn't decide to go out with their friends and randomly choose a film on Friday night, or select one of tens of thousands of titles in a Netflix queue. There was a gun held to their head, it seems, and their only chance of revenge is to whine incessantly about how horrible their experience turned out to be on an internet movie or gaming site board. Suck it up, pinheads, take some responsibility for those actions, and try to approach your overall movie experience a tad more critically. Or just plain shut up.

However, as much as I despise the overly repeated critical shorthand of "so bad, it's good," I find it exceedingly difficult to totally discount this second widely used reaction. The truth of the matter, and any bad-movie fan knows this, is that sometimes movies are so ridiculously noxious, their very rottenness does become entertaining. For years, Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space was touted as the Worst Film of All Time, and it gained a sizable audience for this supposed aspect of its being, even if not only did Mr. Wood have a handful of far worse films in his oeuvre, but there were a great many worse films, by many other equally fumble-fingered creators, at hand. I would much rather watch Plan 9 than the vast majority of them, as I have grown largely inured to the pitfalls of watching a film of such notorious construction, and have accepted it as a Halloween treat or occasional afternoon delight over the years. This doesn't mean that I rate it higher than other bad films, or rank it higher because of the enjoyment I derive from it. Despite my abiding affection for it, Plan 9 is still quite obviously a very crappy and clumsily built film, rating no higher than a 3 on my 9 scale (upon which I rate for overall excellence and fulfilled potential, and not necessarily, or even usually, personal enjoyment).

Peek at a list of the films that showed up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 over the span of the show, and you will instantly recognize many of those "worse" films. Thanks to MST3K, a film like Manos: Hands of Fate, of which I must be honest and admit that I had never heard before the 'Bots nearly discombobulated watching it, has grown immensely in decrepit reputation, as have many others. And, for a short period, Troll 2, completely unrelated to the original Empire Pictures Troll film from five years earlier and not sadly not benefitting (?) from a knocking from the MST3K crew, sat on IMDB as the Worst Film of All Time, though it has since been supplanted by a many other seemingly terrible films. (For the record, as of today, The Starfighters sits at #1 with a rounded 1.4 rating; Troll is much farther down (up?) in the pack with a 1.9; Manos is the lowest rated film with over 10,000 votes, though.)

Personally, I find boredom the most heinous of cinematic crimes. At least, in a truly poor excuse for a film, you can encounter stiffly hilarious acting which can be repeated later over dinner with your pals in an exaggerated fashion, boom mikes threatens to knock off an actor's hairpiece, or someone missing a punch by eight feet but the other actor crashes through the obviously rigged furniture or pile of empty cardboard boxes in the warehouse anyway. These are the types of moments that can make the experience of watching even the crappiest film worthwhile. Humdrum, generic drama that just freezes the screen and makes you check your watch, rote comedy hitting all of the same cliches and beats as the previous 12,637 comedies, or wholly unbelievable romances where two people only deserve each other because they are both insufferable, self-absorbed idiots are far more insidious and unbearable to me. Certainly far more than an ultra-low budget film, posing as a sequel to a film of no relation whatsoever, by small-time filmmakers just trying to eke out a living by having a few local Utah actors spout out some disconnected, half-assed drivel to inane musical cues while fighting a dozen little people in the stiffest, most unappealing costumes ever designed.

I would take the scruffy, ramshackle, wholly untalented "charms" of Troll 2 over the ennui-inducing likes of Stepmom or Bicentennial Man any day. This is not a case where maybe tens of thousands of people voting Troll 2 lowly are just not getting the film, and perhaps it is only misunderstood and in need of a hand guiding everyone over to Troll 2's eventual status as a "lost classic." No, it is most assuredly no lost or misunderstood classic, but the other thing that I do not find about Troll 2 is that it is boring. It was just too shockingly inane to hate. If nothing else, the film is a horn-of-plenty of ineptitude.

But, I will not go deeply into the details of what makes Troll 2 so reversely special in ways you could not even begin to imagine. You can find Troll 2 references and scenes all over the internet, and I wholeheartedly invite you to do so. Make an afternoon of it. Bring a picnic lunch, sit cross-legged in front of your laptop, spread that lunch out on your lap, and enjoy yourself. (Just make sure none of that food is of a sickly green tinge, or you will be adding to it...) Do a search on YouTube, and you can find scads of clips of a character screaming how he is going to be eaten; a ridiculously incongruous dance by the teenage daughter in front of a mirror; Nilbog milk drinking; and the amazing corncob-nuzzling sequence, which, if you have not been exposed to it, will leave your jaw agape in befuddlement (perhaps even oddly titillated... if so, well, that's something you will have to either work out for yourself or learn to accept.)

Like any genre film with a sizable following, a search on Google will lead you to sci-fi, fantasy and horror boards all over the 'net, where people quote their favorite lines over and over. Of course, most of the references to the film comprise one or both of the reactions that I described far above, but that is to be expected in these extreme cases. If you want your Troll 2 quotes all at once, hit IMDb and read 'em all. Well, nearly all of them, for my own personal favorite, the daughter's perfectly imperfect reading of the atrociously written line referring to the "wonderful, half-deserted town of Nilbog," is not actually on the IMDb listing. But, honestly, the entire script is riddled with such incompetence (I have heard whispers that the cast was forced to read verbatim the Italian director/screenwriter's fractured verbiage, but don't quote me on that), that the only justice in making a quote list is to simply read the whole damn thing outright. And if you really want to get closer to the source, there is even a website devoted to a reunion festival/gathering last summer in the town which had been transformed into Nilbog nearly 20 years ago to unleash Troll 2 upon the whole world.

Are we all the better for it being unleashed upon us? That depends largely on whether you are the sort of person more prone to Reaction series #1 or Reaction #2. I am the sort that rather relishes terrible films, almost on an equal par with artistically worthwhile ones, so maybe I cannot be trusted here. Oh, but I can be trusted! I have told you without reservation that Troll 2 is abhorrent by every measurable scale of moviemaking expertise and professionalism. The film sucks. But, then again, the film does not suck. Not in the way that one would usually describe a sucking film. Because what Troll 2 offers, almost completely in spite of what it brings to the table, is unabashed entertainment. It may not be the type of entertainment you were hoping for going in, but... damn it, you rented a movie called Troll 2! If you were actually expecting quality, or even hoping for it, then you are likely the sort who is going to lower oneself to spewing out a Reaction #1 statement.

And if you were expecting Citizen Kane, well, I don't want to know what is wrong with you. Despite this, though, it's likely that we will both come around to Reaction #2 and be content, if not exactly dovetailing, in our shared opinion: Troll 2 is the film for which the cliche "so bad, it's good" was invented. I will just have to learn to accept Reaction #2 as a standard.

For Whom the Bull Trolls (Pt. 1)

A few weeks ago, my eyes rolled across a small item in Entertainment Weekly regarding a new documentary which was getting a tad bit of buzz at the SXSW (South by Southwest) Film Festival in Austin, Texas. The doc was called Best Worst Movie, and it was directed by Mike Stephenson, and if you were to say in response to that tidbit of info, “Who?,” well, so did I. Stephenson, back in 1990, was the child “star” of an incredibly low-budget film called Troll 2, which, in the intervening years, has grown into a minor cult phenomenon, even having a festival held in its honor last year in the tiny Utah hamlet named Morgan where it lurched to life. All of this attention – the festivals, the documentary – did not come about due to any substantial positive success on Troll 2's part, but rather due to its lack of it. Troll 2 is, purportedly, one of the worst films ever made. It even held, for a while, the lowest ranking on IMDB, though several films have since passed it in viewer disdain.

Once I read the EW piece, I knew that I had to see Best Worst Movie, if only because of my interest in both the full breadth of film history and documentaries regarding filmmaking in general. The problem that rises, though, with my wishing to see this film about the making of a legendarily crappy film is that I like to go into these things with some knowledge of the source material. And -- please sit down, those of you who believe that I have already seen every crappy film that has ever crawled from the sludge of low culture -- I had not seen Troll 2. Yet...

Somehow I had avoided it all these years, even while spending many of them watching every horror film that crossed my path, crappy or otherwise. Sure, I had heard intimations from a great variety of sources, some of them personal, of how terrible it was supposed to be, and while this is usually a driving factor into my seeing something (it’s a reaction not unlike being told to smell spoiled milk, and even though you know it’s going to suck to do it, you do it anyway), I have missed every opportunity I have had over the years to indulge myself in the waiting pleasures of this little film that couldn’t (but then kind of did in a reverse fashion).

Naturally, with this latest nudge from EW, I knew my time with Troll 2 had come at last. But I suddenly realized that there was another problem at hand. Even though I knew that Troll 2 had nothing whatsoever to do with the original Troll picture put out by Empire Pictures in 1986, I figured that in the interest of doing things in an orderly fashion, I needed to see that film also. In fact, not seeing Troll in the first place was exactly why I had been putting off Troll 2 for so long. Well, that and really not having any drive at all to actually want to watch Troll 2. As regards the older Troll, somehow, even though I had seen just about every film produced or directed by Charles Band throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s – whether with Empire, Full Moon or otherwise – I had only seen ten minutes here and there of Troll on cable in that time. I knew Sonny Bono was in it, but knew little enough to actually believe for several years that Debbie Harry was involved (I was clearly crossing my movie wires with the original Hairspray here, which features both pop stars-turned-lackadaisical actors). I even knew what the troll design in the film looked like, thanks to having multitudes of special effects magazines like Fangoria in my collection. I just had simply not seen the film.

For some strange reason, MGM, perhaps sensing that the public should never go deprived of troll-enhanced entertainment choices, had put both films out on a dual disc a few years back. This meant nothing to me at the point that they first did it, but proved exceedingly fruitful to my purposes today. I was able to Netflix the disc and cast myself semi-willingly into the pit of souls who have already lived through the seeming nightmare of watching the first two Troll movies.

Troll (1986)
Director: John Carl Buechler
Empire, 1:22, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

Let's get this out of the way from the start: Troll features a teenage boy named Harry Potter (actually Harry Potter, Jr.) who finds himself awkwardly dumped into a world of magic, witches, wizards, trolls and monsters. Before anyone starts yelling "plagiarism" on J.K. Rowling's part, let me stress that upon actually watching the film, the similarities pretty much end with the statement I made above. There has been talk recently (over the past couple of years, actually) that Troll director Buechler was planning to sue, and this was all tied in with his announced intent to remake Troll as a much higher budget feature. Honestly, on the internet, rife with opinions from the left and right without a solid background of research, or even without letting readers know that what they have passed on is only rumor, it becomes hard to trust any source on this story. Yes, I just opened the drawer containing the dark spectre of plagiaristic litigiousness, and now I will slowly roll it shut with nary a sound. Because I really don't care how this one turns out. Rowling's series, no matter her varied inspirations for the material, is strong enough to stand on its own, and I doubt much can come of two pieces sharing a mere character's name and situations involving classical fantasy archetypes. Anyone hearing the Brothers Grimm knocking on the door?

Someone's knocking on several doors of the apartment building which forms the setting of Troll, and it is a little girl named Wendy Anne Potter who has been physically possessed by the titular troll of evil intent named Torok. Little Mr. Torok takes it upon himself to enter the apartments of the residents of the building in the guise of Wendy Anne, whose family has only just moved into the building the previous day, and where she was confronted by Torok in the basement, whereupon he kidnapped her. Torok's plan is to use a magical ring with a green-glowing spike to kill each resident, and then use their life energies to bring back the fantasy world of his younger days, which has disappeared due to the encroachment of mankind and the modern world. Upon their deaths, each apartment fills with new, forested life: trees and foliage and a variety of odd, fantastical creatures (most of them portrayed rather stiffly by all manner of puppetry), until the entire building starts to get taken over by the ancient world. Meanwhile, the only who knows, or cares to recognize, that something has happened to Wendy Anne is her brother, the aforementioned Harry Potter Jr., who senses that the newly maniacal posturings of his once adorable, little blond sister (she throws him across a room, for Pete's sake) cannot be normal. He finds himself entranced by the matronly woman who lives at the top of the building, whom we instantly recognize as the sort who will possess the power, or at least the knowledge, that will help Harry defeat the evil troll and rescue his sister.

It's not a bad set-up for a fantasy movie. So much fantasy takes place in awkward places, and if you think that the setting of the apartment complex is an odd one for such a story, then perhaps you are not aware that it is the very juxtaposition of our familiar, common, everyday world with the hidden magical one that provides the emotional impact behind such fantastical doings. Standing apart from the need that most have to shriek that this is merely a bad movie, and nothing more, I prefer to see in lesser films the remnants of what could have been. The truth should be told that Buechler and Band came remarkably close to producing a pretty decent fantasy film here, if only they had chosen to shy away from some of their baser instincts, and also if the budget truly allowed the bigger special effects and better puppetry for which the story cries.

The one element for which the film does not cry is that of an interesting cast, for it has that in spades. The series of actors is so odd that it really cries out for Kevin Bacon to appear to add another great connector for his namesake game. Harry Potter, Sr. is played by 4-time Emmy winner Michael Moriarty, who really has a nothing role here, but has some amusement doing a goofy dance to Blue Cheer's version of Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues (though it is telling that the story is sparse enough to make room for this unnecessary sequence). Harry Potter, Jr. is portrayed by Noah Hathaway, who was not just Boxey in the original Battlestar Galactica, but also the warrior prince Atreyu in The Neverending Story. (Another truth must be told: he is not very good here.) For pure "icks," Sonny Bono shows up as a swingin' neighbor, and he has his moments playing a misogynistic asshole, while Gary Sandy (Andy Travis from my beloved WKRP, but also not very good here) inhabits another apartment, though the scene where the little girl (possessed by Torok) wanders into his home, though not played this way, is more than a little creepy in tone.

Lost in Space and Lassie mom June Lockhart gets the juiciest role as the secret good witch Eunice St. Clair, and she is not in enough of the film for my tastes. Her scenes almost seem like they have wandered in from another film, which I suppose is what it is sort of like when the fantasy realm invades the real world. Phil Fondacaro not only makes a nice impression under a nice makeup design as Torok, but also shows up as Wendy Anne's "little friend" Malcolm Mallory, a college professor/neighbor she meets on the street, whom the possessing Torok finds fascinating. Fondacaro gets a nice scene reciting some of Spenser's "The Fairie Queene," and his Malcolm is actually the most fully rendered character in the film. On the opposite side, for sheer head-whipping, "What the hell?" casting, a pre-Elaine Julia Louis-Dreyfus makes her film debut in Troll as one of the neighbors, while her boyfriend is played by Brad Hall, her real-life husband of 22 years (married just after this film) and former SNL cast-mate. Finally, Shelly Hack, as always, is stiff and inconsequential as the mother -- but, by this point, why not throw a latter-day Charlie's Angel in the mix?

But an eclectic cast does not necessarily a successful film make -- many failed films, both "A" and "B," flaunt flamboyant casts -- and this one just doesn't have the scope that the material requires. To truly pull off the implied merging of the two worlds requires a good deal more budget, or even more imagination with what little budget they have, than this one does. I admire the chutzpah that leads the filmmakers to one of the later sequences (I won't give away the visual, but it takes place just outside of the building), because it feels like an ultimate conclusion to their build-up of events. But the film's last third rather sputters to that point, where it feels exhausted rather than explosive, and while I did appreciate some of the character work, thanks to the limits of the puppetry (and believe me, as a bad puppeteer myself, it doesn't take much to make me happy in that department), I never really got caught up in the fantasy world. It's like I was ready to commit to the story, despite various disappointments along the way, and then finally decided it wasn't worth it. The other sticking point is the question: Does it want to be a kids' film or a horror film? It is far too gruesome in some elements for the wee ones, but just not gruesome enough to really interest most adults.

The sad part about Troll is that, with a little more scrubbing, a little more detail and a little more love, it could have been worth it. It could have been the worthiest film in Charles Band's stable (which, admittedly, isn't saying much...) These are the films that gall me the most. Bad films are bad films, but there are films where you can see that they were so close to actually pulling even the wackiest idea off, that it hurts a little bit more. It is not hard for me to imagine an alternate 2009 where Entertainment Weekly is publishing an article with the title Troll in it, and it is not about "non-sequel" sequels that might be the Best Worst Movie ever, but rather about the top 25 fantasy films of the past three decades, and there is John Carl Buechler and Charles Band's Troll in the list. Kids adore it, grow up scared and fascinated by it, and it inspires future filmmakers to pursue fantasy filmmaking of their own.

Instead, we have the Troll of 1986 as it is in the 2009 that we inhabit today: just another mid-'80s Band production with lofty ambitions, but without any means possible to really pull them off successfully. But, at least it tries, and I can't begrudge it that.

Which is a hell of a lot more than anyone can say about Troll 2...

[To be continued...]