Troll 2 - Lisa's Review

SHOCKTOBER SPECIAL: BEST WORST MOVIES

In honour of Halloween, we're taking a special "Shocktober" break from the Time-Out 100 Best Horror films, to focus on some of the worst...

Okaaaaaaaaaay.  Where to start?  When Will wanted to choose a bunch of bad movies for Shocktober, he was successful in part, with 1 weeks movie being quite good, but THIS week?   Kudos to Will for this little gem.

Gawd, my mind is still feeling a bit mashed and confused. I do wish I had watched the documentary about the movie before the actual movie itself, but I did it the other way around.  Of course I get the whole 'it's so bad, it's good' thing, but I think you need to be in a particular mood to enjoy this kind of movie.  If I were with a bunch of friends and had a few bevvies, I think I would have enjoyed it much more.  Thing is, when you can't pick a film to watch and review according on your mood, inevitably you will watch movies that your current mood was not right for.

Sooooo, I could sit and type a scene-by-scene account of this movie. Alternatively, I could tell you this movie is about a bunch of midgets dressed in burlap sacks with giant rubber hands and masks chasing after a family in an attempt to change them into vegetable goo so they could eat them.  I shit you not, that's pretty much it in a nutshell.   Vegetarian goblins/trolls who inhabit a town called Nilbog (see what they did there!  Clever stuff!) and work on changing a family (who are on holiday on a house swap with a family who live in a farm in Nilbog) from humans into plants, so they can have dinner.  We see these Metamorphosis in various forms complete with lots of green jelly, sticks stuck onto fingers and what looks like washing up liquid dripping down their faces.

The basic premise surrounds a young boy who is visited by his dead grandfather and told stories about goblins who turn a young man into a green gooey plant to be eaten.  The boys family then decide to go on holiday, whereby they swap homes with an unknown family in a small country town called Nilbog.  The boys sister has a boyfriend who has a bunch of geeky friends who come along in their own mobile home for the ride to add some cannon fodder to the mix.  Basically what transpires is various ridiculous transformations and deaths, various inexplicable scenes (as no-one would do that!), constant contingency problems, the worst acting you'll ever see anywhere and a complete and utter mess of a plot.

The Goblin costumes are laughable, awful!!  You could get better costumes in your local fancy dress store. Given this movie wasn't made to be amusing, I am lost for words.  I struggled to chose the worst actor in the movie as they are ALL so bad.  The women seem to win the prize though with the mother and daughter in the family being frighteningly bad.  

Anyways, the ending is just as bad as the start and the middle, I wasn't in the kind of mood to waste valuable downtime on such a poor movie, so the humor of the sheer awfulness of this movie was lost on me.  However I know there will be people who love this kind of thing (as is attested by the documentary), but it just wasn't for me.  I won't stick an avoid on this one is purely a matter of taste.

All I can say is... thank gawd Shocktober is at an end.