‘Troll 2’ may be the worst ever

Joe Greenberg, Advertising Representative

Forrest Gump, Rocky, The Departed, and The Godfather have all won Academy Awards for Best Picture. But what makes these movies great? Is it the memorable characters? Their cohesive plots? A well written script?

One thing’s for sure, those movies possess all of these traits, however, the movie we’re talking about today has none of those qualities. It’s a movie that’s amazing for all the wrong reasons.

I’m talking about the widely acclaimed “best worst movie” ever made, the one, the only, “Troll 2.” So, grab your double decker bologna sandwich and let’s dive in!

It was Alfred Hitchcock that said, “To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.” As far as the writing goes the director, Claudio Fragasso, wasn’t exceptionally fluent in English and the script was written in the same way in which he spoke. The script would’ve been difficult for a seasoned actor to pull off, let alone the cast they ended up with.

Speaking of the cast, most of the actors had little-to-no acting experience and had attended the casting call to be cast as extras but ended up with leading roles in the film.

Even the unseasoned group of actors had reservations as to whether or not the script was going to work, and even offered to semi-improvise their lines to make the dialogue seem more natural, but Fragasso insisted the lines be delivered verbatim. Needless to say that made it quite difficult for the inexperienced group to convey the intended message in a suitable way. “They’re eating her, and then they’re going to eat me! OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOWDDDDDDD” pretty much says it all.

With the script written and acted in such a way it is easy to lose the direction in which the story flows and that tends to raise a lot of questions.

Questions such as why Grandpa Seth keeps dying over and over again when he was dead to begin with. Seth dies two or three times, and just keeps somehow coming back without any real explanation as to why he can do this.

And what was up with the corn on the cob scene with Creedence and Brent? Was that metaphorical? Did they want to keep it PG-13? Why not just leave something like that out of the movie?

That brings us to the title, “Troll 2,” which would lead you to believe this film is a sequel but it’s not. Troll 2 was filmed under the title “Goblins” but distributors doubted its ability to succeed so they renamed it “Troll 2,” even though it had no connection to the first “Troll” whatsoever.

I cannot speak ill of the cinematography aspect of the film because it was actually shot decently. All the shots make sense if you take them out of context, it’s almost as if it was made by people who knew how to make a movie, but had an off day when it came to everything else besides the filming portion.

I would personally recommend that everyone see it at least once, if not for any other reason than to see how you shouldn’t make a movie. If you’ve got a couple of hours to kill and are looking for a movie that is so bad that it becomes great, then “Troll 2” may be for you!