Troll 2

The performers act in much the same way a tornado acts like an interior decorator when it blows through a town. And each cast member brings a new form of terrible to the movie. It’s as if everyone in a symphony switched instruments to one as far removed as possible from what they normally play. Acting classes have centuries of material from this movie alone on different ways of acting badly. The dialogue approximates human speech in much the way mixing six flavors of Schnapps approximates a fruit salad. If you tried to use Google Translate to convert the dialogue into something other than English, you’d get back a 404 error and tell you it was an unrecognized language. The cinematography has all the deft handling of trying to rebuild the engine of a 57 Chevy with your elbows and a pool noodle for a tool. The camera captures the visuals the way a terrorist captures hostages. There are more plot holes than there is solid plotting. You don’t have to pull at the threads for this movie to fall apart; it does so by mere exposure to the air. The score is as pleasant to listen to as choking sounds coming from your child’s bedroom. The sound mixing seems to have been done by putting the tracks in an immersion blender. The special effects aren’t up to the level of a 1930’s radio serial. The Muppets are more animated and lifelike than the goblins. And yet, this is fascinating to watch. Every element finds a way to not just be wrong, but spectacularly so. The Room is amateurish and inept, but it’s also barely more than a home movie. There was something that was masquerading as professionalism here — a dollar store costume, but it was trying nonetheless. And yet, it still manages to be an abject, unmitigated failure at every single level, but in the most charming ways. It is most definitely not entertaining for the reasons they made it, but it is entertaining nonetheless. Normally I don’t rate terribad disasterpieces on my experience with them, as I think it can be misleading on first blush. but I can’t help there. I had fun with Troll 2. God help me, I had fun.