The Waits family—father Michael, mother Diana, teen daughter Holly, and son Joshua (George Hardy, Margo Prey, Connie Young, Michael Stephenson)—are off on a rustic holiday near the backwoods town of Nilbog. What they don’t know is that vegetarian goblins are waiting to turn them into plants. Luckily, Joshua’s dead Grandfather (Robert Ormsby) pops in randomly to help, which mainly means whispering words of wisdom about goblin food in his grandson’s ear. Holly’s mentally deficient boyfriend and his friends have followed the Waits, and it doesn’t take long for the goblins to start converting them into green goo.
I’m not picky. Really, I’m not. I allow movies a good deal of latitude. If a film has Nazis speaking to each other in ’60s colloquial English, I’m OK with it. If 4th century knights are bundled up in 14th century armor, I just smile and nod. But, if a movie is titled Troll 2, I’m not willing to let it off the hook for not having a troll. It doesn’t need to be a folktale troll, or a Tolkienesque troll. But something, somewhere in the picture, should at least be referred to as a troll, even if it is just a brightly painted rock. No such luck.
Considering the failings in every other area of Troll 2‘s production, why am I dwelling on the title? Because it is illustrative of the filmmaker’s lack of thought. Their lack of talent and artistry needs no illustration.
Troll was a clever, fun, low-budget fantasy. Troll 2 shares with it the word “Troll” in its title. It is also low-budget, though either it had a far lower budget than its predecessor-in-name, or a majority of the cash was spent on doughnuts.
Troll 2 is one of those horrible, horrible movies that can be fun due to the depth and breadth of its stupidity. It’s a film where the monsters are midgets wearing masks that aren’t up to the standards of your neighborhood Halloween shop. None of the actors can…well…act. Michael Stephenson sounds as if he is reading his lines from a cue card, and I’m pretty sure that Connie Young is. The plot includes Joshua urinating on the kitchen table in the middle of lunch, and his parents not finding this to be odd behavior. Ghostly Grandpa normally does nothing but give questionable advice, but sometimes he can materialize and beat on goblins. No reason is given for the variation in his powers. No reason is given for why the sound was recorded with a mono cassette deck found at the local dump either. The basic story is something you might come up with to entertain a three year old, but if this is a kid’s movie, I’d have thought they’d want to reduce the number of times someone says “shit.”
Simply put, this is an intellectually barren piece of flotsam, lacking any entertainment value, except the joy that you might find in making fun of it. But in that one area, it is a fertile paradise.