The mystical awfulness of Troll 2

The story goes wrong very early on, when it’s explained that the Waits family is moving from the suburbs to the country community of Nilbog for a month as part of some rural-urban exchange program. Now, anyone who’s tried his hand at fiction will surely forgive a little shoehorning. Certain things must happen to advance the plot, certain characters must be in certain places at certain times and so on, and a little coincidence or implausibility is eminently forgivable when it’s in aid of a plot point. The trouble with this rural-urban exchange explanation is that it’s so needlessly implausible. We all know there is no such thing in America as a rural-urban exchange program, in which whole families uproot and displace themselves and switch homes with some other family for the sake, presumably, of mixing the rural and urban populations, like something out of the imagination of some mad mid-20th Century Communist central planner.

What’s worse is that there’s a compelling explanation for the move to the country that’s screaming itself hoarse and which could have tied up two other dangling ends at the same time. Apart from this business of the move, we are left with the still bigger questions of why does the ghost of Grandpa visit the boy to warn him about this place called Nilbog and the goblins there, and why do these goblins consume humans? Could the goblins not eat animals like the rest of us, or that is to say, could they not convert animals to the vegetarian goop that they consume as they do with humans? It’s explained at the outset that goblins “need no reason” for what they do, that they eat people out of sheerest evil, but that’s not terribly interesting. Come to that, why are the goblins so hell-bent on eating the Waitses and what odds does it make to them which humans they eat?

So why, oh, why did it not occur to the filmmakers that they had three elements which made no sense at all, but which could be explained in one swoop, all of them together, and in a way that would make the story very much more compelling? The family goes to the country because their recently-deceased patriarch owned property there; the ghost of Grandpa visits the boy from beyond the grave because he has unfinished business with the goblins of his old Nilbog homestead; and the goblins don’t eat people for its own sake but to vanquish their mortal enemies. Maybe the goblins had been driven out of Nilbog long ago but regrouped and reclaimed the place after a long struggle, and maybe the Grandpa character was the last of the goblin-fighters and finally had to abandon the property at Nilbog to save himself, and now the Nilboggian goblins want revenge against their old nemesis, in consuming his surviving family. There, in one motion, the story would have made sense of the senseless and given some purpose to the thing to boot. Not to say it wouldn’t be fairly silly still, but it would at least not be both silly and nonsensical.

To the extent Troll 2 crosses from horror into something resembling science fiction, Jules Verne it ain’t. In order that these vegetarian goblins can at the same time be cannibals, they must first feed the people they mean to eat some elixir which converts them into a vegetarian green goop. Now I know they’re doing great things these days in trying to make soybeans taste like hamburgers, but that’s the point: because soybeans are vegetables, anything that is made from them is necessarily vegetable; if a story is asking us to suspend our disbelief far enough to accept that humans can be converted to vegetable matter, it’ll have to give us some compelling explanation -- science or sorcery, but something big and something particular -- or else the whole business will come off as a joke. And it does. And to this day the Italian fellow who directed Troll 2 is painfully plain that it was not for laughs, and indeed he’s affronted that folks are laughing where he didn’t intend for them to.

The special effects are dreadful, but that’s not necessarily a strike against Troll 2, or anyway it’s not so much a strike against it in this 21st Century. A lot of us are sick to death by now of CGI and have a newfound appreciation for “real” faking. CGI FX are too often too perfect and too canned and too busy to move a lot of us viewing public, and so a puppet arm rigged with fake goblin blood getting the chop with an actual axe is really rather quaint and honest to us today. There’s a lot to be said for cheap and cheerful.

The dialogue comes off by times like it was translated from the German, and that’s not far off: the screenwriter is in fact Italian and not the most expert at the American vernacular.

The acting is said to be bad, but I’m not so sure there was anything in the way of acting in Troll 2 that couldn’t have been salvaged by the right material and direction and editing. Hold a shot for too long and even Remains of the Day could be made to look unnatural and silly. And I defy any great actor to pull off lines and directions like were in that script. Let’s see Anthony Hopkins try and pull off the father role in the most representative scene: Father dumps boy onto bed and bellows, “You can’t pi** on hospitality! I won’t allow it!” whereupon the father goes for his belt and the frightened boy asks what he means to do, with the answer being, “Tighten my belt by one loop so I don’t feel hunger pangs!” The only way to come at material like that and make it work is to play it as a gag, but the director wouldn't hear of it.

I may be prejudiced on this point on account of I incline to what may be called the Roberto Rossellini school, that most anyone can act for the movies if they’re cast in the right parts and if the director handles them and their footage in the right way. They got the chap who plays the proprietor of the general store out of a mental institution, and he did a fine job, despite or maybe because of his being off his nut during shooting. Connie McFarland’s performance as the daughter is held out for special scorn, but I don’t see how her acting was anything worse than what qualified for Saved by the Bell at about that same time -- and Saved by the Bell is an American institution. Robert Ormsby as Grandpa was perfectly competent and absolutely grandfatherly. And I certainly don’t see why the father himself, good old George Hardy, shouldn’t get work as an actor today, provided of course that the roles call for a Southern accent.

Which brings us to the near-mystical question of what it is about this ridiculous Troll 2 that is so fascinating to so many. EPIX, the poor man’s HBO, has run Troll 2 along with its companion documentary Best Worst Movie by Michael Stephenson, who played the boy in the film. As this documentary goes on it becomes plain, slowly but surely and without ever spelling it out, how it was that Troll 2 turned out as it did.

At one point a Troll 2 appreciator in line outside one of the theatrical showings offers that Troll 2 is a movie that aliens might make if they'd been receiving our TV signals and tried to ape what they had seen, without properly understanding any of it. Well, that fellow may have been righter than he knew for: the director is a strange man and an Italian, who only just gets by in English, and the screenwriter happened to be his wife, also Italian and not the most proficient in English. This was an all-American horror picture circa 1990 through the funhouse mirrors of strange Italian filmmakers. That explains it, really, and once you've worked that out then the fascination falls away a bit. Troll 2 is an American movie, and American popular culture for a couple decades up to 1990, as perceived by outsiders who don't have a very firm grasp on anything American.

Which wouldn’t be the first time Italian filmmakers aped an American film genre. I refer of course to the Spaghetti Westerns, which also turned out a bit off and not in a bad way.