“They’re eating her… and then they’re going to eat me… OH MY GOD!”

Justin’s rating: Holy cow! Justin spelled backwards is… um… Nitsuj!

Justin’s review: So you’re the parents of a weight-lifting, spandex-clad teenage girl and a young boy who suffers from night terrors and has visions of his dead grandfather reading him goofily scary bedtime stories. How do you bring the family closer together? Why, by planning a month-long vacation to a semi-ghost town community where you’ll eke out an existence as an untrained farmer until hordes of goblins show up to scavenge you for spare parts!

Welcome to Troll 2, the movie that will take you up on any bet to make something so bad, so insane that it loops all the way around the universe right back to awesomely perfect. Boasting absolutely no ties to Troll other than the name, this fake sequel is a hilarious clash of manic overacting and chlorophyll, where scene after scene engages in a bizarre one-upmanship to outdo the others. It also might be one of the most enjoyable bad movies I’ve seen since Gymkata.

Horror movies have well taught me to never, ever go on vacation, lest I end up in the land of the dead, the village of the damned, or the township of the Amish. Of course, staying home has its own set of risks, but at least there I have internet access. The Waits family in Troll 2 apparently partook of a Green Acres marathon, and decided that it’d be a swell idea to blow through a summer month by swapping houses with a rural family in a cursed county.

The Waitses are comprised of their overlord father, their dumb-as-a-mule mother, their boyfriend-controlling daughter Holly, and their dead-grandpa-seeing son Joshua. While grandpa tries to do the family a good turn by warning them about the dangers of their trip to Nilbog, he stumbles a bit by depending solely on the weakest and most shrill family member. Other than making “I’m so scared” faces and whining about how he can’t do anything, Joshua lacks purpose in the film and Grandpa ends up popping into reality (…somehow…) to take up the slack and give Joshua kamakazi commands.

For instance, Joshua has to resort to increasingly zany antics to keep his family safe, such as peeing on food — after his grandpa stops time, of course — so they won’t eat it and turn into plants. I seriously did not make that up, and it’s up there with the best five minutes of cinema you’ll ever find.

Trailing the Waits family is Holly’s much-whipped boyfriend and his three chums, all of whom have “disposable horror victims” tattooed on their foreheads. They all ignorantly stroll into Nilbog, one of those little hamlets you find every ten miles between New York City and L.A. where everyone’s gone insane, turned into goblins, flocked to a frothy preacher, and signed up with a lunatic druid goth vegetarian. This goes far to prove my theory that vegetarians are only half a carrot away from an unstoppable tidal wave of terror.

Druid Lady spends her idle afternoons turning the few humans in the region into chef’s salads for her goblin children and is understandably upset as Joshua begins to foil her plans with plumb luck and his fire bombing-obsessed grandpa. To be fair, it’s not like Joshua is up against much. The goblins aren’t all that great of a threat, as their method of attack consists of gathering together in a big group and then… um… just standing there. For hours, if that’s what it takes to kill you!

The family goes from stubborn gullibility (“We’re not trying to hurt your son, we’re just, er, giving him some ice cream! While holding his hands to his side and pushing the spoon between his clenched teeth!”) to joining the Church of Folktale Beliefs in a remarkably short amount of time. By the time in this brisk 96-minute journey that they’re putting their hands on the magical stone and eating bologna sandwiches to defeat the evil critters, you’re still adjusting to the fact that a kid just whizzed on dinner as a type of heroic gesture.

There’s profound embarrassment written all over this film, which makes the schadenfreude all the more delicious as we drink it in. After all, where else are you going to find a woman trying to seduce a guy with a cob of corn, or a guy laughing while being tickled by a chainsaw attack, or where the biggest threat a mob of goblins can think of is to throw a bag of neatly-prepared sandwiches at the front porch with the dire warning of “Eat these, or ELSE”? This isn’t a mere stinky movie, you must understand; this is the ground zero for all that was evil before and after.

If you ever visit Nilbog, it’s highly advised that you bring your own food (the general store only sells spoiled milk), avoid the church services, and liberally apply a generous helping of hedge clippers to any of the natives who approach. Trust me, you’ll be far better off for it.

Intermission!

• Nice dorky hat there, Peter
• Being chased down by overweight ewok-things who are barely jogging is an insult to the chasee
• The goblin look: a non-movable mask, and a potato sack with arms.
• That woman’s freckles HAVE to be a transmittable disease of some sort
• If you start bleeding green from your scalp, you might want to see a doctor
• So the kid is seeing his dead grampa, who shows up to tell stories? How dull is the afterlife?
• I think his mom is a zombie. She certainly talks like one.
• It’s a random weight training montage with incredibly skimpy weights! Johnny Depp! Tom Cruise! Smurfs!
• Nilbog… that’s a suspicious name for a town. I bet it doesn’t mean anything spelled backwards.
• Two kids screaming in their rooms don’t draw their parents’ attention… okay.
• Getting racked can change your sexual persuasion
• “A wonderfully half-empty town”. Um, I think there’s a contradiction in that statement there.
• Do kids call them “beaus” these days?
• Everyone in this movie talks like they’re first year drama students. Lots of nods, ridiculous gestures, and bug eyes.
• That kid is great fun to travel with, what with his screaming nightmares and faking to puke and seeing his dead grampa as a hitchhiker
• Fake cloverleaf scars are a warning sign
• I love how they dig right in to a mysterious meal coated in green icing and left behind on a table
• Dead grampa can pause time too, apparently
• So he pees all over the food to stop them from eating? HAHAHAHAHA!
• How to meet girls: chase them, tackle them to the ground, and then introduce yourself while not getting off of them. All girls like that, by the way.
• Yes! Hide in the house/church with the evil flickering torch outside!
• This lady was waiting all day for someone to give her the opportunity to introduce herself. She’s from Stonehenge, dontcha know.
• What, she’s dying so she has to go running all over the house?
• “Why can’t I move?” says the guy moving his head like crazy
• Those were some awesome dance moves. Rock on.
• Those two boys look awfully cozy in that teeny tiny bed there
• This town sure does love its milk! At least it’s free!
• If some creepy weird lady showed up and said my daughter looked “appetizing”, her next words would be “Now please put down the hatchet!”
• Yeah Elliot, choose between your loyal friends or the girl who just pimp-slapped you to the ground
• The chainsaw pruning scene – it only tickles!
• This mom is so laid-back. If the entire town broke into my house to hold a hoe down, I might have objections.
• The cake with “EAT UP!” on it.
• Dead grampa is a lumberjack and into arson! He’s cool!
• If you say that you’re going to KILL THEM, then don’t just stand there for a full minute and let them back on into the house
• The sandwiches! THE SANDWICHES!
• And then, the corn/popcorn seduction scene. Why did I not see this before today?
• Joshua performing an impromptu séance