(1986) Zero stars
Soon after the Potter family moves into a new apartment building, young Wendy begins exploring her new environment. Wandering into the laundry room in the basement she meets evil Torok, a gross little troll that immediately places Wendy under a spell, which enables him to assume her form. Torok’s goal is to turn the apartment building into his lost fairy kingdom, or something stupid like that. Possessing Wendy enables him to wander around the building undetected as he unleashes fairy world, or something stupid like that. As Torok slowly transforms the apartments into fairly world, Wendy’s brother, who somehow figures this all out, enlists the aid of Torok’s ex-wife, a former magical princess, to put an end to Torok’s evil plan, or something stupid like that.
It’s no secret that I have viewed hundreds of horror movies over the years. Throughout this pointless nerd journey I have been exposed to many horror sub-genres. Some are great (e.g., “found footage”) some are bad (e.g. Return of the Killer Tomatoes,) and then there’s a sub-sub category of horror that is so bad that it almost angers me. I have never been able to get through any Troma films or, quite frankly, much of what Catfreek plows through. I find these films to be endurance tests I don’t want to take. There’s a huge difference between a horror movie that ends up being unintentionally awful (e.g., The Ring 2) versus one that was knowingly bad upon conception (e.g., Return of the Killer Tomatoes).
Over the years my earnest attempts to view more horror films than anyone else has occasionally led me down a tedious path to the bad-bad film category. Often I discover these films buried within a horror movie “50 pack” and I watch out of desperation for something novel. This year I was determined to avoid any ultra-crap and instead focus on buzz-worthy films, the 1940s, or any new movies from the past year. Inevitably I caved one evening when I found myself in a car waiting for Whirlygirl to get out of class. She generously left me with her laptop but much to my horror I realized that the only film I had on me was Troll (yes I carry a handful of movies on my person during October for just such emergency situations).
With a footlong from Subway, a large diet Coke, and a meager bag of Baked Lays, I settled in for a Troll viewing. Sadly I finished my footlong far too quickly and realized that I still had 70 minutes of Trollish badness to get through. I also had to pee really badly but I was parked in a large parking lot far from any toilets or even trees. Lamenting the loss of my sandwich and crossing my legs tightly (that never works) I resigned myself to my plight and pushed through the mess that is Troll.
Troll is every bit as awful as you might conclude from my above plot description. I can honestly say that there wasn’t a single enjoyable moment in the entire celluloid mess. A stupid plot combined with bad acting and terrible fx equals abject misery. Worse, I was still hungry and I had to pee.
