“Shoutout to the underappreciated Creedence, who was by far the most over-the-top actor in a movie where a guy yells “Oh My GOOOOOOOOd!” with a real fly on his face.
Creedence is the MVP here, though. Putting on an acting clinic? No. But being interesting in an otherwise uninteresting part of the movie? Totally.
Because that’s really Troll 2’s problem: It’s hilarious for the first half hour or so as we find out that “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is mom’s favorite song, a child urinates on a tableful of food, a ghost grandpa gets confused about whose bedroom is whose, families exchange homes as a method of taking vacation, and so on.
But once we get to Nilbog, the movie wants to be a mysterious, “Just what’s going on here” kind of movie, but the problem is that we’ve already SEEN the trolls in like the first minute of the movie, in broad daylight, so while we don’t know exactly what’s happening, we have a pretty good idea.
The trolls’ plan is pretty Phantasm-y, Phantasm being the movie I use to measure convoluted, overly-complicated plots that involve multiple steps that seem unnecessary. In Phantasm, the tall man kills people, puts them in canisters, then little people roll the canisters across an alien planet. Then, the dead people return as little people. Why and to what end? Nobody knows.
In Troll 2, the trolls feed people green Nickelodeon Gak in order to turn them into vegetable matter, at which point the trolls eat the people. See, the trolls are vegetarians. But I guess they aren’t vegetarians because they don’t believe in cruelty to animals, but rather because they don’t want to eat meat? In fact, it seems like they’d PREFER to kill something in horrific fashion, with extra suffering, before eating it. Which…okay, fine. And I guess the people of Nilbog are trolls in disguise(?) Or maybe Renfields? Who the hell knows?
Point being, Creedence is the only aspect of the film with any life once you get to Nilbog, and the corn cob makeout was enough to buoy me through to the end. “