There are bad films. There are terrible films. There are films so catastrophically misguided that halfway through you begin wondering whether everyone involved was actually making the same movie. And then there is Troll 2, a film that somehow climbed beyond conventional notions of quality, disappeared through a hole in the ceiling, and landed in an entirely new artistic dimension.
Released in 1990, Troll 2 is nominally a horror film. I say “nominally” because calling it a horror film is a bit like calling a wheelie bin a Volvo. Yes, technically both can transport things, but that’s about where the similarities end. Troll 2 contains monsters, screaming, peril and several things that appear to be attempting special effects, but the only genuine terror comes from slowly realising that these scenes were filmed, edited, watched back by actual human beings and then deliberately released.
The first important thing to know about Troll 2 is that there are no trolls in it.
Not one.
The monsters are goblins.
This would be like making Jurassic Park 2 exclusively about ferrets.
The story follows young Joshua Waits and his family, who are heading off on holiday to the suspiciously named town of Nilbog. Now, you may already have spotted something interesting about the word “Nilbog”. If you haven’t, don’t worry, because the film considers this such an extraordinary intellectual challenge that its characters eventually discover the secret by physically writing NILBOG backwards.
GOBLIN.
The revelation is treated approximately like humanity has just cracked the Enigma code.
Joshua has already been warned about goblins by his deceased grandfather, Grandpa Seth, who continues appearing to him from beyond the grave. Nobody finds Joshua’s increasingly frantic behaviour particularly concerning, presumably because this family has much bigger problems, including apparently having never held a believable conversation with another human being.
The acting in Troll 2 is extraordinary because nobody seems to have received the same instructions. Some actors appear to believe they’re performing Shakespeare. Others behave as though they’ve been kidnapped from a nearby petrol station and told they’ll be released once the scene is finished. Every line is delivered with either absolutely no emotion whatsoever or enough emotion to alert nearby emergency services.
This eventually leads us to the legendary “They’re eating her! And then they’re going to eat me! OH MY GOOOOOD!” scene, a moment of cinema so powerful that describing it as acting feels inadequate. It is closer to witnessing someone’s operating system crash in real time.
The plot revolves around vegetarian goblins attempting to turn humans into plants so they can eat them.
Take a moment with that sentence.
These goblins are vegetarians, but they desperately want to eat humans, so instead of simply reconsidering their dietary choices, they have developed an elaborate supernatural agricultural process in which people are transformed into vegetation first. It is essentially ethical cannibalism with extra paperwork.
Their preferred method involves feeding victims strange green food. And when I say green, I don’t mean spinach green or healthy smoothie green. I mean radioactive industrial-waste green. Cakes glow like traffic lights. Drinks resemble antifreeze. Entire dinner tables look as though Shrek has exploded across a branch of Greggs.
Yet the terrified family repeatedly has difficulty establishing whether any of this might be suspicious.
At one point Joshua realises his family is about to eat the contaminated food and desperately needs to stop them. Does he shout? Knock the food onto the floor? Explain the supernatural goblin situation?
No.
He stands on a chair and urinates on dinner.
His father responds with the immortal declaration:
“You can’t piss on hospitality!”
And honestly, there it is.
Cinema perfected.
Citizen Kane can pack up its little sled and go home.
The goblins themselves are another triumph. They appear to have been assembled using rubber masks, old Halloween decorations and whatever loose materials somebody discovered behind a garden centre. Rather than terrifying creatures of the night, they look like disgruntled employees from a medieval-themed restaurant who have just been informed they’re working Christmas Day.
Their leader, Creedence Leonore Gielgud, is even better. She begins as an eccentric witch-like figure and gradually becomes something resembling a budget glamour model trapped inside a community theatre production of Macbeth. Her performance is enormous. Every expression suggests she’s trying to communicate with astronauts using only her eyebrows.
Then comes perhaps the film’s most erotic scene, involving Creedence seducing a young man using an ear of corn.
You read that correctly.
Corn.
She rubs the corn against him until, through mechanisms that neither science nor agriculture can adequately explain, the entire room begins filling with popcorn.
It’s less Basic Instinct and more Farmfoods After Dark.
But what makes Troll 2 genuinely special is its absolute sincerity. This isn’t deliberately bad cinema. Nobody is looking into the camera and winking. There are no clever jokes acknowledging the absurdity. The film marches confidently forward like a man leaving a pub toilet with four metres of toilet paper attached to his shoe.
Every bizarre decision is delivered with complete conviction.
That’s why you can’t really hate Troll 2.
You start watching it because you’ve heard it’s one of the worst films ever made. Twenty minutes later you’re laughing at the acting. Forty minutes later you’re quoting it. By the end, you’re emotionally invested in whether Joshua can defeat a population of vegetarian goblins using the awesome supernatural power of a double-decker bologna sandwich.
Yes.
That’s how the final confrontation works.
Joshua defeats the goblins by eating meat.
It’s essentially an advert for Bernard Matthews directed by someone experiencing a fever.
And somehow, against every conceivable law of filmmaking, it works.
Not as horror, obviously. Nobody has ever finished Troll 2 and nervously checked under their bed for goblins. But as entertainment? Magnificent. You could spend £200 million making a blockbuster and still not create anything as memorable as a man screaming “OH MY GOOOOOD” while watching somebody transform into green sludge.
Most bad films are simply boring. That’s the real crime. They disappear quietly from memory, destined for obscure streaming categories and DVD boxes in charity shops.
Troll 2 refuses to disappear.
It is gloriously, spectacularly, enthusiastically wrong.
The dialogue is wrong. The performances are wrong. The monsters are wrong. The title is wrong. The food is radioactive green. The villains are vegetarian cannibals. A ghost granddad freezes time. A child urinates on dinner. A woman weaponises an ear of corn.
And every single one of these catastrophes somehow makes the film better.
Verdict
Troll 2 is not a good film.
It might actually be the opposite of a good film.
But that’s precisely why it’s brilliant.
It is the cinematic equivalent of watching somebody reverse slowly into a bollard, pull forward, attempt the manoeuvre again, hit the same bollard harder and then confidently get out of the car to inspect the bollard for damage.
Rating: 1/10 as a film.
10/10 as an experience.
47/10 if you’ve had several beers.
