These were fitting last words for Michael Stephenson spoken nearly twenty years ago in his role as Joshua Waits, a young boy whose hallucinatory visions of his dead grandpa Seth help him to narrowly escape the clutches of some ravenous goblins in Troll 2 (dir. Claudio Fargasso, 1990). Evidently this all but forgotten piece of ultra low-budget trash-horror film history would not be celebrated as quite the groundbreaking horror classic that, as Stephenson speaking at a
But recently reunited with his co-star and onscreen dad George Hardy – the real-life Alabama dentist who back in the day was paid $1500 for a role he'd all but forgotten about – to introduce and field questions at Fantasia about their oft-disavowed work, Stephenson was able all of these years later to finally celebrate Troll 2 in all its refreshing eccentricity amidst a partially drunken, partially stoned, but entirely reverent crowd assembled to celebrate the film’s recent elevation to cult classic status. As it turns out, the film that for Stephenson had been somewhat of a guilty pleasure to make, has since grown over these past twenty years or so into an unpredictable and wildly entertaining filmic event for small pockets of fans all over the world.
Troll 2 may ultimately owe its infamy to an online ranking as the all-time worst movie on the Internet Movie Database’s (IMDB) Top-100 list of worst movies, but the real story is a far more engaging and personal one. The film became somewhat of an underground internet phenomenon while Stephenson, Hardy, and the rest of the colourful cast of characters involved in the film’s production (including 80’s Italian softcore film star Laura Gemser, as a particularly astute fan pointed out during the Q&A) were busily moving on with their lives. Fan sites and music videos started popping up. Homage was even paid to the film in Sony Playstation’s immensely popular Guitar Hero 2 videogame. Committed fans organized costumed Troll 2 screening dinner parties; and, as the truly die-hard fans will invariably do, they eventually managed to track Stephenson down via his MySpace page in order to pay their proper respects.
That was four years ago and Stephenson has since hooked up with Hardy to make one of the most impressive documentaries running the festival circuit this year, Best Worst Movie. The documentary, which has drawn favourable comparisons with Seth Gordon’s The King of Kong (2007) and won the People’s Choice ‘Best Documentary’ prize at Fantasia this year, follows an intimate reunion of the film’s idiosyncratic director and cast members through an extended celebration of Troll 2’s revival by fans across the world. And the
While waiting in line for the Troll 2 screening at Fantasia this year a friend and I encountered George Hardy, who Stephenson makes the central character in Best Worst Movie, as he made his way slowly through the crowd greeting fans individually and asking them, one by one, if they had seen his film yet. It took little effort to catch in this strikingly modest
Commenting in an interview on the apparently paradoxical love fans have for this allegedly all-time worst film, Stephenson remarks, “[s]ure the writing is bad and the acting is bad, based on cinematic principles. But where it doesn’t fail is that it has heart and it has sincerity. Most movies today don’t have that.”* (‘most movies’ here especially refers to such big-budget contenders in the worst film category as Paul Blart: Mall Cop; shameless promotional vehicles marred by a complete lack of charm). Experiencing Troll 2 with a live audience, it becomes clear that Stephenson does not mean by 'heart' and 'sincerity' anything abstract either, nor anything ultimately reducible to a matter of personal opinion. Troll 2's heart and sincerity are manifest in the openness with which audiences interact with the film, sometimes tossing popcorn at the screen during the unforgettable ‘popcorn’ sex scene, sometimes counting out the seconds while Joshua, having had time conveniently frozen by his Granpa Seth, circles his family trying to think up a way to keep them from eating the dinner their hosts have so hospitably laid out for them. It is a tremendously participatory film, even if, like the vast majority of trash films, it originally earned its reputation through late-night/early morning cable-television airings and video-store rentals.
Whether it be Troll 2, the classic Z-movies of the Plan 9 From Outer Space (dir. Ed Wood, 1959), Manos: The Hands of Fate (dir. H.P. Warren, 1966) variety, or John Waters films; fans of the trashier film genres are not consigned to reading these films ironically, nor do I think that irony plays any serious part in what attracts audiences to these types of films in the first place. Rather, watching a filmmaking crew not quite realize their ambitions is something that any lover of film can relate to - put simply, the cast and crew of trash films are easy to identify with. This is compounded by the fact that most everyone who works on such films has a day job, and is in the same tax bracket as his or her audience. Closely related to this, audiences can also easily relate to the desire on the part of the cast to lose themselves in their fictional roles (or alternatively, a filmmaker's desire to lose himself in his story), and the battle that this entails against forces as dull and inescapable as poverty and a simple lack of time - a battle that, like their audiences, they for the most part lose out against.
With this in mind, Troll 2 actually captures the principal themes of trash film spectatorship remarkably well. It is foremost a coming-of-age story wherein the young Joshua Waits is forced to confront the forces of reality as they twist something that began as a quaint story, a figment of his overactive imagination, into something real but initially implausible, that terrifies him and with which he must grapple if he is to survive as a person. Moreover, this is something he grapples with personally, since everyone else in his family has become so dulled to the effects of reality that they have lost the ability to imagine its dangers - their sense of what is plausible keeps them from experiencing the threats they will come to face as real. These threats, moreover, just so happen to take the form of ravenous vegetarian goblins that descend on people when their mindless consumption of food has turned them into vegetables. Predictably, escaping the wrath of the goblins will also, for Joshua, entail learning to cope with problems without the help and guidance of his family (in many cases he is the only person in a position to save them), and, moreover, it will also ultimately force him to confront the mortality of his grandfather who, for a good portion of the film, communicates to him from beyond the grave.
Of course, the goblins don't look real, the acting and dialogue are pitched at a remarkably high level of absurdity, and the plot twists involve a colorful variety of supernatural or otherwise implausible flights of the imagination. But Troll 2 does, nevertheless, directly ask us to question what we find plausible, whilst effectively demonstrating that by not entertaining fictions that may seem terribly unconvincing to us, we risk falling into mindless routines - in other words, we risk becoming vegetables. It departs from generic conventions so regularly, and turns out to be such a thoroughly strange film, that it leaves a door wide open for anyone who might want to join the party. And if that wasn't already enough, it sends a pack of goblins to chase you through that door and towards a memorable night.
* For the complete interview: http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/06/02/interview-director-michael-stephenson-on-best-worst-movie-troll-2-as-geek-phenomenon-the-alamo-drafthouse-skate-vids-and-pizza/
No comments:
Post a Comment