No Good Very Bad Movies 16: The one with Harry Potter

 

Title: Troll

What Year?: 1986

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Mashup

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

As I write this, it’s closing on half a year since I started this feature, and I’m really much further along than I thought I would be. A major reason for this is that quite a few movies featured up here would otherwise have ended up elsewhere, especially under Featured Creature and my animation reviews. Often, these decisions have been spur of the moment judgment calls. With the present review, I am coming to something different, a movie that’s been on my radar a long time which I went through a lot of further debate about. What settled its place here was its quite unusual history and status, as a movie at once notorious and relatively overlooked, all because of developments completely beyond the control of those who made it. I present Troll, the movie that Troll 2 was supposed to be a sequel to, which somehow ended up overshadowed by it, and as a bonus, it does indeed have a kid named Harry Potter.

Our story begins with a family called the Potters moving into an apartment building otherwise populated entirely by annoying sitcom side characters. As they are unpacking, another new arrival appears, a strange humanoid creature who promptly takes the place of their daughter Wendy. The big brother, named Harry Jr, is immediately suspicious at his sister’s increasingly rambunctious and precocious behavior, but no one else notices anything amiss. Meanwhile, the supernatural being quickly picks off the apartment denizens, apparently transforming them into woodland fay folk of his own sylvan dimension. It all gets a convenient backstory when Junior meets up with a spunky matron who reveals herself to be an enchantress and the villain’s old flame. She reveals that the entity is a great warlock transformed into a troll, in punishment for his dastardly scheme to wipe out the human race and replace them with fairies. Now, the troll needs only to transform the last of the tenants to bring the fairy world to Earth. It’s up to the kid to save his sister and the world, or the building is truly going green!

Troll was a 1986 horror/ urban fantasy film from Empire Pictures and producers Charles and Albert Band. The movie became the directorial debut of special effects creator John Carl Buechler, following a credit for one segment of Empire’s Dungeonmaster the previous year. The film starred veteran character/ B-movie actor Michael Moriarty as Harry Potter and Noah Hathaway of The Neverending Story as Junior, with June Lockhart as the witch Eunice and Philip Fondacaro in a duel role as the troll and professor Michael Mallory. The supporting cast included Sonny Bono and Julia Louis Dreyfuss as apartment dwellers and Anne Lockhart as a stand-in for her real-life mother as the de-aged Eunice in the finale. Effects for the film were created mainly with practical/ animatronic puppets and some stop-motion and optical effects; it notably did not feature the Band crew’s chronic offender David Allen. The movie received mixed to negative reviews on release, with many criticizing its mix of horror and fantasy elements, but still grossed $5.5 million against a budget of up to $1.1M. The film received further notoriety due to the release of an unrelated film as Troll 2 in 1990, without the knowledge or consent of the makers of either film. The film is available for streaming from Amazon.

For my experiences, I’m sure I first heard of this one in connection with Troll 2. What quickly struck me was how rarely reviewers that film ever discussed this one at any length. Considering the infamy of the non-sequel, one might expect a collateral notoriety, if not backhanded praise just to emphasize how bad the other was. Instead, it slipped so far into the shadow of Troll 2 that it was for a long stretch difficult to obtain except as an add-on with that film. The only other film I had encountered with this kind of negative space was “Trek 1”, with the obvious difference that the sequel which overshadowed it was actually good. I finally got motivated to investigate when I acquired Dungeonmaster, along with the mess that was Creepers. After I reviewed that film, I finally requested the 2-pack from Netflix, and it was genuinely up in the air which one I was going to review. I never regretted my choice, but I knew I had unfinished business. Ultimately, I returned to it several times before I was ready for this review, because it is weird.

The first and obvious point to make about this movie is that it has nothing like the issues of Troll 2 or Creepers. At the same time, it’s not hard to see why it never rose to the status of a “cult classic”. For fans of the Band crew in particular, it’s difficult to take as anything but a disappointment. This shows especially in the effects, which is all the more baffling as I’m entirely satisfied that several of the creature puppets were flat-out recycled from Dungeonmaster, which certainly did better in this among other areas. The obvious explanation is the familiar problem of letting an effects guy run the show, which in this case can be said to get better if you look at other films the director did. What remains even more puzzling is that it does on a certain level bear out its unmemorable reputation, which shouldn’t be the case by any object standard. This is easily among the most surreal entries in an era of strange experiments, as evidenced especially by the transformation effects (not to mention the musical numbers…). The best explanation I can suggest is that it’s just polished and “mainstream” enough to create a misleading sense of familiarity. That, in turn, brings in the prominent debate whether it either ripped off or was ripped off by certain other properties, a question I find no more interesting than its similarities to other Band crew efforts.

Meanwhile, what I find most noteworthy about the film is its nearly on-the-nose treatment of urban fantasy. In these terms, it is definitely forward-thinking (compare with The Gate a year later), but it also shows many of the potential drawbacks of the genre. The ultramundane apartment dwellers furnish a few good moments, like an early interaction between Bono’s character and a lady friend (“…Unfortunately…”), but there are many more that feel as trite and dated as a sitcom. The premise is further stretched by the lack of genuinely likeable characters, with Moriarty’s father figure being perhaps the most nuanced (and the source of easily the best lines). These issues further divert from the simple fact that the fantasy elements of the story remain quite routine. After all the strangeness of the effects, it comes down to a story of a kid who can conveniently beat the competent adults with information and artifacts that are literally handed to him. (That brings up an idea I’ve kicked around for a satire where all the fantasy-land denizens really just humor the human child adventurers to keep them out of any actual danger.) It’s a good enough story, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before and since. For that matter, it’s the type of fantasy that would usually be aimed at younger audiences than the  movie’s PG13 rating indicates.

That leaves the “one scene”, and there’s one that has stood out to me from early on. In the middle act, a friendship begins between the troll in its child guise and the midget professor Mallory. In their longest one-on-one interaction, the child persona starts with pleasantries and an accepted offer of juice. She innocently muses, “You seem at peace with the world around you,” then asks about the professor’s health. When he responds with more pleasantries, she says, “You’re fibbing.” He quickly admits that he is terminally ill, doing his best to explain in a child’s terms. There’s signs of empathy and deeper thoughtfulness as the troll responds, seemingly vexed by the questions of mortality. He then shares a further memory of learning of his dwarfism, finally remarking, “I kept on waiting.” It’s a genuinely poignant scene, not quite in character for the film yet not entirely wasted, and a further setup for one of the most effective creature shots soon after.

In closing, I come as I often have to why I am covering this movie here. It definitely didn’t fit in with Space 1979, even less so than Troll 2 did. I gave it more though for Featured Creature or its spinoff (see The Dark Crystal), but very quickly decided it simply wasn’t up to the quality of the movies I was covering there (yes, including Mimic 2 and Starship Troopers 3). That left this feature, and I freely admit I still had mixed feelings about it. For the rating in particular, it got what it has virtually by default, except not in the sense I have used it for maligned or controversial films like Saturn 3 and Frozen. Again, it’s not nearly as bad as Troll 2, let alone Creepers, but then, nobody ever said it was. The one thing it didn’t deserve reputation-wise was to be overlooked, especially in comparison with the “sequels”. Even then, the final verdict is that there are clear and understandable reasons it was forgotten, which would probably have been even more complete without the infamy of the subsequent film. I stand up for it as a film worth watching despite its flaws. And with that, I have one more loose end out of the way.