The Dunk Tank: Troll 2

Written in pidgin English by a director unable to communicate with his talent as a way to sublimate his wife’s irritation with her vegetarian friends, nonsensically renamed mid-production in the vague hope of capitalizing on an unrelated film, and starring among others a local dentist and a cataclysmically stoned man on a day trip from a nearby psychiatric facility, Troll 2 came into a world with all the vitality and pedigree of one of those little benign tumors full of hair and teeth. As an artifact of ultra-cheap filmmaking at the intersection of splattery, drippy 70s horror and 80s sentimental family horror-lite, Claudio Fragasso’s movie certainly succeeds in encapsulating the worst of all its tributary sources. Its dialogue is pure nonsense, its pacing spastic, its tone seesawing from unintentional humor to high camp antics before ending on a single note of genuine revulsion. For a movie so obsessed with food it’s decidedly half-chewed, or under-seasoned. Whatever culinary metaphor one cares to apply.

Aside from a sort of garbled investigation of the frustration of being a child with knowledge the adults around you refuse to accept, the film’s main thrust is a tirade against evangelical vegetarianism. The goblins who plague the Waits family are a strange mix of carnivore and obligate herbivore, compelled to transform human beings into half-living plants before devouring the resultant hybrid lifeform. It actually maps fairly well to a commentary on the colonial and individualist nature of vegetarianism, a moral undertaking in which animal rights supersede the rights of farm workers. I do not, to put it charitably, think the film is attempting to engage an idea this complex. From its meandering opening ripoff of Rob Reiner’s seminal The Princess Bride to its pitch-black final twist, Troll 2 seems almost malicious in its lack of coherence, stretching the establishment of perhaps five or six pieces of information across ninety minutes with the sadistic, dead-eyed glee of a middle-school bully torturing frogs.

The film’s anchoring performances are… odd, to say the least, from Deborah Reed’s campy, strident evil sorceress to Hardy’s inexplicable sexual menace as the Waits family’s patriarch. The broad archetypes are more or less identifiable. There’s the wide-eyed youngest child (Michael Stephenson) and his oversexed teenage sister (Connie McFarland), the dopey boyfriend (Jason Wright) and the wise grandfather (Robert Ormsby), but the film’s cast of oddballs and amateurs imbue these familiar fictional roles with confusing and contradictory energies even as Fragasso’s script sends them looping through the same bland motions. Holly and Elliot feud over whether or not he can keep his three beautiful platonic boyfriends, Joshua and the specter of grandpa Seth talk about how much danger they’re in, and the witch Creedence Leonore Gielgud offers fragmentary and yet somehow belabored exposition. That it manages to conjure so much as an instant of real disgust or fear is the only true piece of fairy tale magic anywhere close to this heap of sun-dried cinematic afterbirth.