The Journey Begins - Troll 2

Release Date: October 12, 1990
Budget: N/A

I have to admit, upon viewing Troll 2, I thought the game was up: this could easily be the worst movie of all time.  But with some encouragement from Jenn and Tom, I have decided to press on with the rest of the 24 movies on the list, but this movie is "Ohhhhh Myyyy Gaaawwwwdddd" awful.

Some of the immediately curious facts about Troll 2 are 1) although the movie was titled Troll 2 to capitalize on the minor success of Troll, it had no relation to the first movie including none of the same actors, storyline, or production company, and 2) we learn from dead Grandpa Seth in the first minute of the film that there are no trolls in Troll 2, only goblins.  No, I'm dead serious.

In a nutshell, Troll 2 is about young Josh's attempt to save his family from the cruel fate of being eaten by the evil, human-hating, albeit vegetarian, goblins after Josh's family decides to engage in an exchange program.  The exchange program sends Josh and his family goes to the country town of Nilbog (the goblins' kingdom) for a month and the country family (who turn out to be goblins disguised as humans) goes to live at Josh's house for a month.  Surprisingly, the exchange program is least far fetched idea in the movie.

Troll 2 derives a lot its awfulness from the extremely bad acting, with the daughter taking the cake: Connie Young, playing Holly Waits, wouldn't have made stage crew in any Faribault Senior High School plays... although Deborah Reed as Creedence Leonore Gielgud is equally as bad (thankfully, this was Deborah Reed's only acting roll; she disappeared until 2001 when she went on Hollywood Squares as a contestant and won).  The movie also suffers from numerous timeline problems, awkward dialogue, and terrible special effects.  The real problem with Troll 2, though, is that it is a 5th grader's screenplay acted by community theater actors that somehow got a big kid's budget.  Ridiculous from start to finish.

Before I rate this steaming pile, I'd like to describe my rating system for future reference: the way I see it, good movies get graded on a scale of  0 to 10 stars, but movies like Troll 2 don't deserve anything positive.  Movies within this project will mostly likely fall in the negative scale of -1 to -10 stars with -10 being the worst, or "winner".

I give Troll 2 a final rating of -9 stars.  I really cannot describe in words how bad this movie is and as bad as the beginning of the movie is, it somehow progresses in its badness and crescendos in a seriously awful finale.  The only thing that keeps Troll 2 from receiving the worst possible rating on the aforementioned scale is that it had me bent over with laughter at its terribleness and frequently putting my hands on my head saying: "what the fuck..?".  As tired as I am right now of Troll 2, I somehow have a feeling I'll be watching it with you again at our bad film festival.

Good Night Troll 2 and, "no", I don't want some.