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TROLL 2 (1992) A truly minuscule effort not affiliated in any way with the forgettable, yet cinematically-released TROLL (starring, to use the term loosely, a budding, young Julia Louis Dreyfuss.) Forcing an affiliation with another, unrelated film is even more questionable when the previous movie wasn't even a box office success. I could understand trying to sneak your film into, say, the Star Wars franchise, but George Lucas probably has a much more attentive stable of lawyers (but let's hope not too attentive. See our review of The Star Wars Holiday Special) than do the producers of the original Troll. Even if they did find out, I have a feeling they wouldn't care, it's not like they're using it (like stealing the bumpers off of an abandoned car... go ahead, take them.) Unfortunately for Joe D'Amato, director of Troll 2, it doesn't look as though the losing streak that began with the first Troll film will end any time soon. Let's take a moment to discuss the career of Mr. D'Amato... or, should I say Stephen Benson... or John Bird... or Drago Floyd? It turns out that Director Joe D'Amato has worked under no less than 40 different aliases, including Sarah Asproon, Donna Aubert, and Hugo Clevers. I guess you'll change names almost as often as your shirt while trying to claw your way out of the world of Italian pornography (although it doesn't look like he tried too hard, judging by the way he dove right back into it with 1995's Homo Erectus.) So, the creative mind behind The Hot Life of Al Capone, Experiencias Eroticas, and Unleashed Perversions of Emanuelle engages in a little cinematic breaking and entering and creates one of my all-time favorite bad flicks: Troll 2. Now, you might be expecting to see Trolls, and rightly so. What you get, however, are "Goblins." Perhaps this underscores what an afterthought the title was or maybe it was Mr. D'Amato's mad dash through a copyright loophole. The main character is a young boy named Joshua, who spends a great deal of time talking to his dead "Grandpa Seth" about goblins. His family is concerned about his odd behavior, but dead Grandpa Seth knows they'll be laughing out of the other side of their faces when they go on a vacation to the town of NILBOG (I'll let you hold your monitor up to the mirror now), where they have some sort of time-share arrangement with relatives they don't seem to have ever met. Grandpa Seth harps on young Joshua constantly about the danger awaiting them in NILBOG, as if there was anything Joshua could do to stop his family from going on vacation (if there were, do you think I would have suffered through all those damn glass museums in Cape Cod when I was a kid?) The family arrives in NILBOG and settles down to a repast of what looks like green doughnuts. The food was left for them by their creepy relatives who are obviously under some kind of evil influence, insinuated by their intentionally cardboard acting. Like a phantasmagorical telemarketer, Grandpa Seth arrives just as the family is about to take their first bite and warns Joshua not to let them eat... if they eat the NILBOG food, they'll turn into NILBOGS, I mean GOBLINS. Grandpa Seth has learned a few tricks since dying and he snaps his fingers, freezing time for everyone except Joshua, who has 60 seconds to figure out a way to keep his family from eating. Most of us would probably throw the food away or something simple, but Joshua thinks outside the box. He stands on a kitchen chair and urinates all over the dinner table. Catastrophe averted. Joshua soon realizes he'll need more than just his bladder to save his family when he sees the town's name in a car's side-view mirror. He finally catches up to the audience as he exclaims, "NILBOG is GOBLIN spelled backwards!" That's right, knowing is half the battle, Joshua. NILBOG is inhabited by goblins in human form, who are bent on, I guess, world domination, starting with Joshua and his family. They plan to feed them something called "NILBOG milk," which will transform them into plants and, eventually, green goo which the goblins just love to eat. The acting in Troll 2 is all striclty on the level of a high-school play. Only two of the main actors, Michael Stephenson (Joshua) and Connie McFarland (Holly, Joshua's sister), have ever worked before or since (though not often,) and it's really no mystery why. It's obvious that the film's producers were going for a sort of "Saturday Evening Post," all-American-apple-pie-faced little boy when they chose Michael Stephenson for the role of Joshua, but they couldn't have been further off the mark. It's a challenge to settle your stomach as you bear witness to the gruesome facial contortions achieved by young Mr. Stephenson while in the throes of "acting." Check out the BEST OF THE WORST SPECIAL MICHAEL STEPHENSON GALLERY for samples of his facial grotesquery. |
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