Since its release, Troll 2 has gained a reputation as an extremely bad film – it currently ranks at No. 6 on the IMDB’s Bottom 100 films list, for instance. Some of the dialogue is excruciatingly bad. The villagers gathered around the besieged farmhouse throw a bag at the front door and make threats like: “There’s sandwiches for tonight in here. It’ll go easier if you eat them. Otherwise we’ll be forced to kill you – violently.” Connie McFarland threatens her boyfriend with lines like: “If my father discovers you here, he’d cut off your little nuts and eat them.” This is bad enough in itself, but the cast enacting the lines all feel like they have been recruited without anyone taking the time to make sure they had ever attended an acting class. While the actor playing the grandfather does an okay job, there are some notably bad performances, especially from Connie McFarland as the sister, who lends new meanings to the term stilted. As the mother, Margo Prey acts as though she has been pickled with depressants the entire way through shooting. Especially awful is Deborah Reed who appears in various guises as Creedence, the goblin queen. Reed’s theatrically hammy acting, added to an incredibly fake looking makeup job, which makes her look like the goblin equivalent of a cheap floozy, has a hammy scenery-chewing excess that leaves one looking for new pejoratives that travel well beyond ‘astoundingly atrocious’.

The goblins are incredibly cheap looking – they only ever look like dwarf extras wearing cheap masks and sacking. Troll 2 does share something with its supposed predecessor in that much of it is centred around gooey makeup effects with people melting down and transforming into plants. There is an entertainingly schlocky scene where Darren Ewing is turned into a seedpod, oozing with what looks like green food dye and is then devoured by the goblins. He later turns up alive mounted in a planter. After his friend tries to rescue him, Deborah Reed’s Creedence enacts revenge on him for trying to escape (a point that the film enters the clearly tongue-in-cheek) by getting out a chainsaw and insisting “You won’t feel a thing.” There is a mind-boggling scene early on where the young hero (Michael Stephenson), under his grandfather’s guidance, stops his family eating a goblin-food laced banquet by standing on the table and pissing on the food. The most bizarre sequence in the film is where Deborah Reed transforms into a young, beautiful woman and struts up to David McConnell in the campervan, after first appearing on the tv, and proceeds to seduce him. This is conducted while she holds onto a corncob that she then puts between their mouths as they start kissing. And after he mentions how he prefers popcorn, popcorn starts popping all over them as they make out.

If nothing else – and believe me, there is nothing else of note about it – Troll 2 should take some credit for being the first film about the horrors of vegetarianism. It is a horror movie told from a meat-eater’s point-of-view, where the evil trolls are vegetarians who want to devour humans (after they have been turned into plants). The goblin queen raves on about the horrors of toxins and cholesterol and in the mind-boggling climax the young hero saves the day by producing the secret weapon his grandfather has given him – a double-decker baloney sandwich – and eating it in front of the goblins, which then banishes them. (I can’t believe I just wrote that).

Troll 2 has gained such a reputation as a bad movie in recent years that it has gained a cult afterlife with various sell-out revival screenings. The cult grew to an extent that Michael Paul Stephenson who plays the kid in the film later made a documentary Best Worst Movie (2009) that charted the cult and gathered together the cast to tell about the making of the film.

(Review copy provided courtesy of Ryan Kenner from Movies in the Attic).