Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #179 Troll 2 (1990) — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone.

When it came time to choose Happy Place pieces for The Joy of Trash: Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place’s Definitive Guide to the Very Worst of Everything (whose Kickstarter, incidentally, ends today!) I gravitated towards movies and books and television shows with bizarre and fascinating backstories. I didn’t just want to write about a bunch of crazy shit: I wanted to tell the too strange for fiction stories behind the stories.

That’s why the film portion of the book begins with the big bang of Plan 9 From Outer Space followed by Manos: The Hands of Fate, a beloved stinker whose impact on bad movie culture is similarly hard to overstate.

Behind every legendarily insane so-bad-it’s-transcendent cult movie lies a famously eccentric creator, whether it’s Ed Wood Jr., Rudy Ray Moore, Neil Breen, Tommy Wiseau, Uwe Boll or Troll 2 director Claudio Fragasso.

Like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Dolemite and The Room, Troll 2 inspired a cult classic documenting its preposterous creation in the wonderful 2009 documentary Best Worst Movie.

With Best Worst Movie, Troll 2 lead Michael Paul Stephenson was able to work through his formative trauma starring as spooky kid Joshua Waits in a film widely considered the worst ever made (a high honor indeed!) and establish himself as a talented filmmaker with a keen eye for the wonder and complexity of the human condition.

Stephenson’s deeply human masterpiece explored, with empathy and riotous dark comedy, how the surreal onscreen psychodrama of Troll 2 reflected and mirrored the offscreen madness.

The future Best Worst Movie director was able to give a shockingly convincing performance as a sad, spooky child who is scared and confused and has no idea whether the bizarre adults around him can be counted on to take care of him because he was, in real life, a scared and confused kid surrounded by larger-than-life grown-ups with inscrutable ways and thick accents who seemed as lost as he was, if not more so.

If you remove the dialogue and see Troll 2 as a weird art film about the paranoid delusions of a mentally ill, grief-scarred child coping badly with the death of his superstitious, much-loved grandfather, it’s easier to understand why Fragasso thought he was making a fundamentally serious horror film, a sort of contemporary Grimms’ fairy tale and not an accidental laugh riot.

Troll 2 embodies the essence of The Joy of Trash, in that it is generally considered one of the worst movies ever made, if not the worst. Yet it remains an endlessly fascinating, eminently re-watchable treasure that’s mesmerizingly terrible, yes, but also oddly sinister, hypnotic and dream-like. There is a deep, rich, bizarre world inside Troll 2 all the more unforgettable and remarkable for looking and feeling almost nothing like our own.

At every step Troll 2 echoes its torturous and endlessly mythologized making. Troll 2 is about a dorkily All-American family that foolishly wanders out of the world it knows for the sake of adventure and ends up being glared at by outsiders with ominous intent and dismissed as blundering fools who have no idea what they’re in for or what they’re doing.

That’s not a bad description of the behind the scenes drama as well. Fragasso famously did not speak much English. His cast did not speak Italian. Much was lost in the translation, like coherence and logic, but much was gained as well, such as incoherence and dream logic.

In Troll 2, bad movie lovers were gifted a look at American life unlike any before or sense, in no small part because it feels so defiantly non, even anti-American.

Moonlighting dentist George Hardy brings big dad energy to the role of cornball patriarch Michael Waits, who decides to indulge his lifelong dream of leading a pastoral existence by agreeing to a home swap with a glowering, sinister family from rural Nilbog with wife Diana (the effortlessly ethereal Margo Prey, who has the saddest, spookiest, most haunting eyes this side of Meg Foster), preppie daughter Holly (Connie Young) and little Joshua.

Before they leave for a singularly ill-advised vacation, Joshua is warned by the ghost of his dead grandfather Seth (Robert Ormsby) about the dangers posed by vegetarian goblins who transform people into plants by feeding them tainted food or drinks.

From that point forward Grandpa Seth is the Z movie equivalent of a Force Ghost. He pops up at various intervals in various guises to offer counsel and assistance to his perpetually distraught grandson.

Nothing about Grandpa Seth and his Doc Brown/Marty McFly dynamic with our pint-sized hero makes sense. Sometimes it seems like Seth has a corporeal presence. Other times he’s pure ghost. Also, I’m not really sure what the deal is with him and heaven or hell or purgatory. And he can stop time, apparently, like Zack Morris on Saved By the Bell? Seth’s existence raises all manner of questions that Troll 2 has no interest in answering.

Seemingly every character in Troll 2 occupies a different universe, not just a different film and a different genre. Joshua’s older sister Holly, for example, seems to be in a wacky, lighthearted teen sex comedy about a popular girl with all the right moves who can’t convince her horny but immature boyfriend to stop spending so much time with his knucklehead pals so he can commit to her and a serious relationship.

Her boyfriend, Elliot Cooper (Jason F. Wright) and his hormone-crazed teen buddies, meanwhile, are in a staggeringly idiotic teen sex romp about some doofuses in a trailer who travel to a spooky town of the damned under the apparent misconception that it’s the bikini babe capital of the known universe and not a hellhole inhabited almost exclusively by milk-chugging goblins in human form with the occasional Druid Witch thrown in for spice.

Part of Troll 2 is inexplicably devoted to the ostensibly comic adventures of some deeply misguided horndog bros who travel to the wrong town to get laid and end up paying a terrible price. Yet it nevertheless chooses to play a number of other deranged scenarios completely straight.

For example when they get to Nilbog Grandpa Seth informs his extremely suggestible grandson that he’ll have to find a way to keep his family from eating tainted food and drink and turning into goblin chow.

So in a fit of stomach-churning inspiration, after Grandpa Seth freezes time (because he’s a god or a demon or a Yeti or an angel or a Frankenstein’s Monster or something) our plucky young hero whips it out and urinates on the meal the family is eating, and also all of the food in the house, in order to save their lives.

In a rage, Michael utters the immortal line to his son, “You can't piss on hospitality” and reaches for his belt in anger but rather than beat Joshua he instead tells him that he is, “tightening my belt one loop so that I don't feel hunger pains, and your sister and mother will have to do likewise. Okay, Joshua. You wanna get rough with me? You wanna show me that you don't like the choice of this house for our vacation by going on a hunger strike? Well, I'll accept the challenge. But just remember when I was your age, I really did suffer from hunger. We'll see who gets through this, but just remember I've got more practice than you.”

Judging from the way the sequence is shot and edited, Fragasso apparently did not think that there was anything funny or ridiculous about a traumatized young boy in constant communication with his dead grandfather’s ghost soaking the family’s dinner in a thick stream of urine to keep them from being turned into plant monsters and devoured by vegetarian goblins played by little people in what look like store-bought Halloween costumes.

The film’s auteur seemingly finds the very idea that something like that would be laughable faintly insulting. After all, within the universe of Troll 2, the stakes for this piss-ruined meal could not be higher.

If Joshua Waits does not make the bold choice to turn the family meal into a makeshift urinal then his family is lost to the evil of Nilbog and the goblins forever. In this case, and pretty much only in this case, peeing on dinner is a heroic, selfless act requiring tremendous courage and resolve.

The townspeople of Nilbog are pretending to be human beings for the sake of luring outsiders into town to be eaten but as is often the case with space aliens, robots, goblins, monsters and various other beasties, they’re not trying very hard. Everything about them pretty much screams, “Evil” and “Stay away!” so of course dopey daddy refuses to read or heed the obvious signs.

If Stephenson is in a moody, arty drama about a psychologically damaged boy’s intense relationship with his dead grandfather/guru and the teens are in a horny teen romp Deborah Reed seems hell-bent on bringing back silent screen acting as Druid Witch Creedence Leonore Gielgud.

Reed seems to be challenging herself to give the biggest, broadest, most theatrical performance in the history of film. If her eyes bugged out any more they would pop out of their sockets and roll onto the ground.

In a development that, honestly, I found a little far-fetched, the Witch Queen with the Norma Desmond eyes uses a Stonehedge Magic Stone to give the goblins their malevolent power.

This leads to a thrilling climax where the Goblins—who cannot handle meat or meat-eaters—are thwarted by Joshua heroically eating a double-decker bologna sandwich whose meat powers help defeat the goblins.

What other movie defines heroism so uniquely? Heroes come in many forms and sizes but it’s rare for them to assert that heroism through either processed meat consumption or purposeful urination.

Only a fool would expect logic and sanity from Troll 2. Its only logic is dream logic; the only rule it recognizes is that too much is never enough, and that there’s no such thing as too crazy or too weird.

Troll 2 isn’t a movie so much as it is a cinematic fever dream, a howl of confusion and incoherent rage with the curious, primal power of a waking nightmare.

It’s also intermittently artful as well as unique and unforgettable.

Troll 2 ends on a genuinely affecting note. After having ostensibly survived their unfortunate sojourn in Nilbog and made it home in one piece, mother Diana, relieved that she can now have a nosh without becoming Goblin food, takes an apple from the refrigerator (oh, the biblical symbolism!), not knowing it is tainted, and devolves into a monstrous glob of foaming green goo being devoured by hungry goblins.

Watching his mother and protector be eaten alive by monsters, our devastated protagonist lets out a scream of pure horror before being frozen for eternity in a film-ending freeze frame.

It’s a boldly bleak ending, a stone cold bummer all the more jarring for focussing on the wildly expressive face of a small child who has been through hell and a child actor given an impossible, impossibly challenging role in an impossibly insane movie.

There is a magic to Troll 2, just as there is a magic to Plan 9 From Outer Space and Dolemite and Manos: the Hands of Fate. Just as it is a goddamn miracle when a movie is perfect, it is equally miraculous when a movie does everything as wrong as possible in a way that’s impossible to predict or replicate, the way Troll 2 does.

Loving movies like Troll 2 is my job. Thankfully it’s my passion as well.

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