Troll 2 Directed by Claudio Fragasso
There’s also an element of empty spectacle at work here. The movies singled out for attention aren’t really the worst of the worst—those movies are so affectless they fade from memory immediately—but the movies that are bad in the most spectacular manner. Can it be a complete coincidence that The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the first bad movie to find an adoring cult audience, came out three months after Jaws, the movie that established the template for the mindless summer blockbuster? When kids are ten, they turn out at the multiplex to see cars and planes and helicopters crash and burn; when they’re 20, they turn out at the midnight show to see the entire movie crash and burn.
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But as in any cult, there’s a fair amount of mind control going on here. “Everyone had to become obsessed with it—we brainwashed them into it,” Ficks explains. The most uncomfortable scenes in Best Worst Movie show Hardy attending a sci-fi/fantasy convention in Birmingham, England, where no one knows Troll 2, and a horror convention in Dallas, where no one cares. His awkward attempts to explain the movie’s appeal and act out its most ridiculous scenes are met with polite laughter and blank stares. Eventually the embarrassment of trying to sell this dubious experience to the uninitiated gets to him, and in Dallas he retreats into a sulk. “Tons of gingivitis,” he observes, surveying the convention hall. “I guarantee you, only about 5 percent of these people floss their teeth on a daily basis.”
Opens Friday at the Music Box. Hardy and Stephenson will introduce the 9:45 PM screenings on Friday and Saturday, which will be followed by midnight shows of Troll 2.
