Jeffrey:

Right off the bat, I’m going to have to disagree with you, my friend. I in fact believe that 13-year-olds do have the most discerning taste. That’s why I date them exclusively.

"If I'd only followed my agent's advice and done Troll 2, I might still be famous."

No, no. That isn’t true. I’m open to teenagers of any age. And Mr. Segretto, you will get no disagreements from me on anything you’ve said. Troll 2 is wonderfully, brilliantly bad. It is jam-packed full of senseless dialogue, wooden acting, awful special effects, miserable acting, bizarre shot choices, and godawful acting. If you’ve ever seen an Edward Burns movie, you might think you know bad acting. But you have never seen bad acting like this before. In fact, by far the most believable performance in the film comes from the 10-year-old lead, Michael Paul Stephenson. When you are an adult actor and you’re starring in Troll 2 and you’re blown off the screen by a 10-year-old, it is time for you to move on in your life’s path.

Now, like Segretto, I’m not the kind of guy who generally enjoys bad movies. Most bad movies are only fun in groups, and I am rarely seen in the presence of a group. But Troll 2 is, I think, a beast of a different color. As I watched Troll 2, I had a difficult time believing that it wasn’t meant to be a parody. If Tim and Eric were asked to make a parody of Troll 2, they would make Troll 2. There is literally no difference between this film and a parody of this film. That’s what’s known as the “uncanny valley” of filmmaking, and thinking about it makes my brain hurt. I imagine that on the first day of filming, the auteur behind the film (billed on IMDB as Claudio Fragasso, billed in the movie under the incomparably-brilliant pseudonym “Drake Floyd” (incomparably brilliant, that is, until you see that he is elsewhere billed as “Drago Floyd”)) took a look around at the laughably bad goblin costumes and food filled with noxious green food coloring and actors coated in slime and he said, “fuck it, I’m just gonna hang out at craft services and let this thing direct itself.” And from that moment on, the goblins were in charge.

As Mike mentioned, Troll 2 is, at heart, an anti-vegetarian horror movie. The biggest weapon the bad guys have in their arsenal is sandwiches. There is essentially one conflict in Troll 2, which plays out in one scene after the next: will the good guys eat the food that will turn them into plants? Or won’t they? And if you, the viewer, happen to notice that every malevolent food item is slathered in an unappetizing green frosting, and no one in the family mentions it, well, then you’re just missing the point.

Mmm … toothpaste corn.

There are plenty of awesomely hilarious inconsistencies in Troll 2, but here are some of the things that stuck out to me the most:

- The biggest subplot centers around whether or not the teenage girl’s boyfriend will hang out with the girl instead of his (flamboyantly gay) friends. The parents in the film do not trust him, because he spends too much time with his friends and not enough time fooling around with their daughter. As far as I know, no actual human daughter has ever faced this dilemma.

It's not what it looks like! We were just practicing!

- The young star, Josh, communicates with his dead grandfather. Why is the grandfather dead? The grandfather does not need to be dead. In fact, the grandfather isn’t dead, because he keeps cropping up to lend a helping hand and give people baloney sandwiches.

Of course! It all makes sense now!

- The clever Josh figures out the secret to the town when he sees the word “Nilbog” in a mirror. Try looking at the word Nilbog in a mirror. It does not look like “goblin.” It’s not a word that is composed of symmetrical letters, like, say, “IVY.” If you could not figure out that Nilbog was goblin spelled backwards simply by looking at the word Nilbog, then seeing it in a mirror would probably not tip you off.

- On that note, the name of the town is “Nilbog.”

- For all their seeming menace, the goblins in this film are not very proactive. Their only job is to get the human characters to eat their food, which turns people into a human-vegetable hybrid that is very tasty to goblins. The best trick they can come up with is to hand the characters a food item and say, “here, eat this food.” They apparently have not devoted much time in their several millennia of existence honing their sales technique.

- Near the end of the film, there’s a standoff in which the family attempts to contact Grandpa Seth by holding a makeshift seance. The goblins wait patiently outside the house while the family holds hands and “concentrates,” which, I guess, is as good a seance technique as any. Throughout the film, the goblins spend a lot of time waiting patiently for the humans to fall into their traps, which, again, are not so much traps as proffered snacks. If the goblins were clever, they really could just bum-rush the family at any point and force feed them. But, I suppose we wouldn’t have a movie if that were the case.

Who is the best goblin, you ask? Clearly, this one. This one is the best goblin.

Really, though, there’s not much I can say about Troll 2 that will be any funnier than the movie itself. It is so brilliantly incompetent that any attempt to make fun of it only makes it stronger. I would love to post video of my favorite scenes, but I have spent the last hour and a half trying to figure out how to do so without going through YouTube, and I have had no luck. If I figure it out in the near future, I’ll slap some scenes up … but for now, I’ll have to leave you with this compilation someone else was kind enough to post for me. Enjoy!

On the Awkward Scale of Pizzas, I give Troll 2: 6 PIZZAS!!!

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