Troll 2 (1990)

Movie Info

You are what you eat!

Joshua Waits (Michael Stephenson) has a problem…he’s been seeing his dead grandfather Grandpa Seth (Robert Ormsby). Grandpa Seth has a warning for Joshua:  beware of the goblins!  When Joshua’s parents Michael (George Hardy) and Diana (Margo Prey) plan to take Joshua and his sister Holly (Connie McFarland) to the town of Nilbog for a summer vacation, Joshua realizes Grandpa Seth’s warnings could come true.  The Waits family is joined by Connie’s boyfriend Elliot (Jason Wright) and his friends, but all of them could become food for a village of goblins bent on consuming them!

Directed by Claudio Fragasso, Troll 2 is a horror B-Movie.  It is in name only a sequel to 1986’s Troll, and was critically panned upon its release.  The movie however over time gained a cult audience much like the original Troll which eventually led to midnight showings.

Please don’t eat me!!!

I saw Troll 2 when it was “new”.  I had kind of liked the original Troll as a fan of things like Gremlins, Ghoulies, and even Munchies, and Troll 2 seemed like a natural.  The only store that had Troll 2 at the time of its release was our local grocery and I eagerly rented it…taking it home to say:   “What the hell?!?!”  I’m not going to pretend like Troll was a masterpiece, but Troll 2 failed to even have trolls…it was goblins as the star this time.  Even if the movie had been developed as Goblins, that wouldn’t have helped the movie.  The plot was all over the place…and there were reasons.

The production was marred by problem. The cast couldn’t understand the director or most of the foreign crew and had no direction. The script kept changing and made no sense and the actors were almost all novices that had never made a movie…and yes, it shows.  As a comedy, Troll 2 almost works.  It tries to reach social commentary about processed foods etc, but due to the acting and language barriers, it has no chance of working.

Popcorn sex is hot!!!

The cast really struggles.  You could blame the language barrier, but the movie also has actors that don’t seem to even attempt to bridge the language barrier.  The conversations they are having don’t really make sense.  If they were thinking while acting, they might have delivered the lines differently…or questioned what they were doing (especially surrounding Holly’s ambiguously gay boyfriend and his friends).

The movie has a shoestring budget.  The goblins are just masks (bad at that) and people wearing burlap sacks.  The “goblin effect” is essentially just green slime dumped on people who drink the clotted, rotten food.  One of my favorite scenes is the popcorn sex scene with characters gnawing on a corncob while popcorn is thrown on them…it is as bad as it sounds.

See Troll 2 if you have the chance. It is horrible but so good. It makes no sense and that is the joy of the movie.  You have to ask what is going on through the whole film.  Once you’ve seen the movie, see the documentary Best Worst Movie which attempts to chronicle the film’s creation by the its “star” Michael Stephenson…it is also entertaining and sometimes even tragic.  Troll 2 was followed by a sequel in name only called Troll 3 (or sometimes The Crawlers) in 1993.

Related Links:

Troll (1986)

Best Worst Movie (2010)