Troll 2

Here are some things to know before you watch Troll 2:

1. It’s not actually about trolls, but goblins.
2. You will need at least a 6-pack of beer per person, and possibly 3 beers need to have been drunk before watching this movie. If you’re not a drinking person, but a drugs person, I can’t help you there; you’re going to have to figure out the equivalent yourself. Straight-edge? Well, it may or may have not been nice to know you. (Okay, I admit it, I did not have any beer in the house when we watched Troll 2, so you may turn out okay, you just may feel no joy and have some hurt feelings for a few days).
3. If you do not warn your friends or significant other about what you are about to watch before pushing “play”, they will most certainly think that you are trying to break up with them and are just too chickenshit to admit it. This is what I frequently asked my boyfriend when we watched this, and said it for two days. I also threatened to find a new boyfriend.
4. Neither the Band Family, nor any of their subsidiaries are to blame for this movie. I repeat: they had nothing to do with this one. MGM however, should be ashamed of themselves.
5. If you’re anything like me, the constant mentions of “Grandpa Seth” will just make you wish that you were watching a movie with Seth Rogen instead of this.

Troll 2, at various points, is usually neck-and-neck with Manos: Hands of Fate as having the most votes for “Lowest Rated Movie” at the Internet Movie Database. Granted, whenever I check it, which is rarely, it’s constantly fluctuating between those two movies, various Uwe Boll films, and whatever direct-to-DVD movie starring Paris Hilton that has come out recently. While I believe Troll 2 and Manos are terrible movies, I don’t put much heed to the list at IMDB. I’ve seen people campaign for the movies on the list, and the inanity on the message boards on that website will make your head explode. IMDB is a perfectly good resource otherwise.

My boyfriend put the Troll/Troll 2 Double Feature DVD in his Netflix queue about a year ago after we started getting into the Rifftrax website. By the time we watched this last week though, he had completely forgotten about the Rifftrax until I chided him about it. So I can’t really say whether or not having Mike Nelson make fun of this movie would help.

Troll 2 is about a somewhat unattractive family who can’t act and who recently lost their grandfather switching houses with another family for a week. They consider themselves a “city” family (uh, okay, suburbanites, keep telling yourselves that), and they switch with a family from a small town called Nilbog. Sometimes, you should really base your traveling or housing plans based on the name of a town or street. Nilbog is not a nice name for a town, and if you’re reading this carefully you’ve probably already figured out a chunk of the plot. Congratulations. Anyway, youngest child Joshua frequently has visions of Grandpa Seth, who tells him bedtime stories about goblins, and insists that they’re true. His family, instead of perhaps taking him to a psychiatrist, just keeps insisting “Grandpa Seth died 6 months ago and you need to stop this nonsense.” He has an older sister who has an idiot boyfriend who always takes his friends with him anywhere, not understanding that if your friends are around, you’re not going to get laid. But instead of telling him this often, she pretty much just punches him in the balls a lot. After they come to an understanding, he agrees to meet her and her family the next morning so he can go to Nilbog with them. Of course the dumbass instead rents an RV and takes his unattractive friends with him, telling them that there has to be pretty ladies that will have sex with them in Nilbog. I think these dudes are all in denial personally, but either way don’t expect charming loser dude group antics like in Knocked Up. So the family spends the trip to Nilbog telling the daughter what a loser her boyfriend is and Joshua dreams that his family turns into goblins and hallucinates that he sees Grandpa Seth hitch-hiking. Once they arrive at the home, they meet the creepy family that they’re supposed to be trading houses with. Their son tosses a softball to Joshua that says “Eat before we eat you” in green frosting. They go into the house and find a meal laid out that is mostly cakes and cookies covered in green frosting. It’s not very nutritious, considering most people want real food after driving for so long. Joshua knows something is wrong and summons Grandpa Seth, who stops time so that Joshua can piss on the food so his family won’t eat it and turn into food for the goblins. Yes, I’m serious.

Joshua gets sent to his room and his dad gives a bizarre speech about having to go without food when he was a kid. After that, it’s more of his family not believing him, three of the idiot boyfriend’s friends getting plucked off after the introduction of a witch who looks like an off-brand Carol Alt who has something to do with Stonehenge. The sister doing a dance in front of a mirror in one of those old Garfield Zodiac sign nightgowns that K-Mart used to sell in the late 1980s (I can’t remember if I had one, but I know I wore something similar when I went as Maggie Simpson for Halloween when I was 9) and pretending to give a speech that will lay down the law for her boyfriend. The town has no food, just weird thick milk. The dad and Joshua discover that the family they were trading spaces with hasn’t left town, there’s a weird get-together and the people fix Joshua’s family more of the same food. I forget what Joshua does to the food this time, but a guy catches on fire. Eventually there’s a showdown with the town, as well as a séance to bring Grandpa Seth back to help.

Basically the goblins are vegetarians. They have to turn humans into the equivalent of that goo in Bad Taste to eat them because their bodies can’t process meat and they think meat is evil anyway. This film is basically anti-vegetarian. If it weren’t so ridiculous, I’d be offended. There’s also a twist ending of sorts.

It’s been recently revealed that the actor who played Joshua is now making a documentary on Troll 2 called Best Worst Movie, to come to grips with his past. He actually grew up to be a kind of cute looking guy. But the documentary covers the cult phenomena this movie is, why a group of Italians went to Utah to make the movie, as well as some of the actor’s lives now. The guy who played the dad is a dentist in Alabama. Some people claim in the trailer that Troll 2 is this generation’s Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I don’t know. I guess maybe in the larger or hipper cities.

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