Watch it alone, and you’ll laugh. Watch it with friends, and you’ll create a religion. Watch it stoned at 2 AM, and you might just see the face of God (who looks suspiciously like a goblin in a rubber mask holding a corncob).
If you’ve never heard of Troll 2 , you’re probably wondering why a 35-year-old Italian B-movie (filmed in Utah with an American cast) still haunts the cultural periphery. The answer is simple: It is the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It is not merely "so bad it’s good." It is so aggressively, sincerely, and spectacularly wrong that it loops all the way back around to genius. A wholesome American family, the Waits, swaps houses with a creepy family in the rural town of Nilbog ("Goblin" spelled backwards—yes, the film has to point this out to you). Young Joshua has a vision: the town’s cheerful inhabitants are actually goblins, led by the seductive witch Creedence. Their plan? To feed the family "magic" green slop that will turn them into vegetables (celery, specifically) so the goblins can eat them. troll 2
Five stars. Zero quality. Infinite joy.
Director Claudio Fragasso (under the pseudonym "Drake Floyd") reportedly told his English-speaking cast to act "more American." The result is a cast of children, amateurs, and locals who perform every emotion—fear, joy, confusion—at the same volume: maximum overdrive . The dad, Michael, delivers lines like a man who just realized he left the oven on. The mom, Diana, looks perpetually like she’s smelling a bad egg. Watch it alone, and you’ll laugh