Troll 2 may be the
worst movie of all time. It is #93 on IMDB’s bottom 100 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105643/).
It has a 0% critical fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/troll-2/).
It is the subject of the documentary Best
Worst Movie, which is where I became familiar with it. (This documentary is
also available on Netflix Watch Instantly.)
It has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Some movies are
terrible, but afterward you can say, “At least the acting was good” or “Well, the
cinematography was interesting” or “The costumes were stunning anyway.” There
is nothing to recommend this movie.
And that is, of course, why it has gathered a cult
following. It’s a train wreck of a movie, but catastrophe is compelling.
According to Best Worst Movie, the
people who worked on Troll 2 set out
to make the very best movie they could, but the results show they failed in
every way. So there’s a certain level of schadenfreude
to it.
I mean, this is a movie where shape-shifting, vegetarian
goblins (not trolls) force humans to eat food that will turn them into a
vegetable goo buffet. It’s a movie where the scariest monsters look like
children wearing potato sacks and remaindered Halloween masks. This is the movie that asks us to believe
that a ghost that can stop time, deliver a secret weapon to his grandson, manifest
himself physically to wield an axe and create Molotov cocktails, cause
lightning to target people, and yet can’t help inadvertently becoming a peeping
Tom on his granddaughter. This is terrible, terrible movie.
And part of the pleasure is seeing how bad the movie gets.
It starts out awful and then gets worse. Yet, as several people in Best Worst Movie point out, it’s hard to
hate this film. The movie reminds me of stories that my kids developed as they
played with their toys. In their stories, Cinderella played with Simba while
magical unicorns bathed cats in a school bus. I knew that those stories were
never going to be good or satisfying in any traditional sense, but there was a pleasure
in knowing that almost anything could happen.
Another reason I think this movie has such an appeal is that
I think, deep down, most of us realize that if we ever tried to make a movie,
it would probably end up looking more like Troll
2 than Aliens. I have a
tremendous amount of sympathy for the filmmakers and actors. I can easily
imagine myself thinking I was being terribly clever naming the vacation spot
Nilbog and scripting a revealing moment when my protagonist would look into a
mirror and discover that Nilbog backwards is Goblin. I’d be so pleased that I
crafted makeup to look like someone was turning into a tree. I’d practice
acting outraged for days so that when it came time for my big “You can’t piss
on hospitality! I won’t allow it!” scene, I’d just nail it.
And all of it could be crap. Every last bit of it. That’s
the scary part about being creative: our very best efforts are more likely to
be terrible than genius or even adequate. But God bless creative people; we
keep trying anyway.
Watching Troll 2
helps us recognize that movies are a giant puzzle, and it takes more magic than
can be found in a Stonehenge rock swirling with eldritch mists to put all of
the pieces together into something that someone else will want to watch and
truly enjoy. If just one piece is wrong, the audience can immediately see it
when they step back and look at the picture. Troll 2 illustrates just how many pieces there are in a movie
because not one of them fits with another. And there, but for the grace of God,
go I.
Next up: An episode from the TV show Louie: “God” (available on Netflix Watch Instantly: Season 1,
Episode 11)
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