All Rise...

Judge Patrick Naugle used to live under a bridge too.

Editor's Note

Our review of Troll 2 (Blu-Ray), published October 15th, 2010, is also available.

The Charge

Gives a new meaning to the word "trolling."

The Case

Here is a double feature that is a B-movie lover's wet dream. How can you go wrong with Troll and Troll 2, two films that are both terrible in the best way possible? Clearly the films were a labor of love for their respective directors, John Carl Buechler (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood) and Claudio Fragasso (Hell of the Living Dead), which is why they've gained such an enormous cult following: nobody making them seemed to understand how terrible they were.

In Troll we meet a family of four including dad Harry Potter (Michael Moriarity, The Stuff), mother Anne (Shelly Hack, The King of Comedy), son Harry, Jr. (Noah Hathaway, The Never Ending Story), and daughter Wendy (Jenny Beck, Tightrope). The Potter family (yes, there was another Harry Potter before that Harry Potter) has just moved into a new apartment complex with a lot of kooky neighbors including a hunting nut (Garry Sandy, WKRP In Cincinnati), a swinging bachelor (the late US senator Sonny Bono), and an elderly woman named Eunice (June Lockhart, Lost in Space) who has a talking mushroom at her desk and a magical secret up her sleeve. Things come to a head at the apartment when a weird troll (Phil Fondacaro, Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood) obsesses the body of little Wendy and begins creating an army of snarling, drooling trolls that are hell bent on creating mischief and chaos in the apartment building! Troll 2 features the unsuspecting Waits family—including father Michael (George Hardy), mother Diana (Margo Prey), daughter Holly (Connie McFarland), and son Joshua (Michael Stephenson)—as they settle in for an extended stay in the small town of Nilbog. What the Waits don't know is that the town has been overrun by vegetarian goblins who want to turn the Waits into one big vegetable buffet!

If you've come to Troll looking for lots of monsters, you're in luck—Troll has them in spades, from hairy beasts to tiny elves to weird goblins and talking plants. This is a movie that certainly knows its audience. There are things covered in slime with sharp teeth and deep, growling voices. If you're looking for something more along the lines of a truly engaging story or deep characterization, Troll is going to disappoint. The entire movie mostly takes place inside an apartment complex that gradually gets covered in leaves and vines. There isn't a lot of rhyme or reason to Ed Naha's (Spellcaster) screenplay, which just sort of bounces from one even to the other to keep the viewer's attention.

Troll is not a great movie. It's not even a very good one, at least not by the standards most movies are judged. Crafted on a low budget by Charles Band's now-defunct Empire Pictures, Troll plays out more as a whacked out fairy tale than as an out-and-out horror movie. Director John Carl Buechler seems to know his limitations and doesn't try to make Troll anything more than what it is: an oddball horror-fantasy that features a lot of practical effects work (which are pretty decent considering the budget and time period) and some rather ridiculous performances (see: Sonny Bono as a weird sex maniac). The movie adds to very little in terms of story or acting; it works best as a relic from a time when movies like this could find an audience on VHS just by showing up in a rental store.

Surprisingly, the worse of the two ends up being the most entertaining. Troll 2—I reviewed the original Blu-ray a few years ago—is bad in every conceivable way: acting, directing, music, costumes, effects, and directing. It's as if the spirit of Edward D. Wood, Jr. had taken over the entire production. With a budget of around $200,000 dollars (roughly the same as a week's worth of catering for any Tome Cruise film), Troll 2 looks just good enough to watch but amateurish enough to be totally in awe that it even got made. The plot is so simplistic and inane that going into the details would be a waste of time; a family moves to a town called Nilbog that is filled with goblins (yes, it's a movie called Troll 2 and, no, there are no trolls in the film) and said goblins try to kill them.

Troll 2 has amassed a cult following because it's shoddily made and stupidly constructed with a screenplay that was tossed into a wood-chipper before being set in the actor's hands. Troll 2 finds every way to screw things up from terrible effects (the goblins are just small children in unconvincing Halloween masks), to bad acting ("Now they're going to eat me! OH. MY. GAWWWWWWWD"), to music that sounds like it was crafted in the basement of that one friend we all have that really could have used a few more piano lessons. Truly, this is bad movie making at its finest.

Troll / Troll 2 (Blu-ray) is presented in 1.85:1 widescreen in 1080p high definition. Neither of these transfers are crystal clear—their age and budget limitations all but assures that the picture quality will be passable at best. Even so, there are some solid colors and dark black levels to be found in the images. Troll 2 tends to look slightly better than the original Troll, but not by a wide margin. The soundtrack for Troll is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 in English while Troll 2 sports a much more robust DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround mix, both in English. The original Troll's soundtrack is decent if flat and uninspired (and totally front heavy). Troll 2 includes some decently placed surround sounds, though this isn't the most aggressive or exciting of audio mixes. Also included on this disc are English subtitles for both films, plus Spanish and French subtitles for Troll 2.

Extra features on Troll include a solid "making of" feature on the film's production ("The Making of Troll"), a theatrical trailer, and a photo gallery, while Troll 2 includes a commentary track with George Hardy and Deborah Reed and a theatrical trailer for the film. As an added bonus, Scream Factory is also including a bonus standard DVD copy of the documentary Best Worst Movie (about the making of Troll 2) with the first five thousand pressings of the Troll and Troll 2 double feature.

The Verdict

This double feature is awesome in its badness.

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