Troll 2 (1990)

(In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) A legend of the so-bad-its-good genre, Troll 2 does manage to bring together the counter-intuitive elements of the best of those movies: Halfway-competent technical credits that offer the basics of a watchable film, albeit with occasional terrible dips that bring attention to themselves. Also included: A nonsensical script that offers renewed surprises of the bad sort. Plus: Incompetent acting, confounding sequences, botched conclusions, extraneous characters… it’s all there, and the result actually lives up to the anti-hype and the Internet memes. (This being said: watching it in French, the badness of the result is hampered by good-faith efforts from the translators to make a better product and the competency of the dubbing voice actors. Although there’s a limit to how much they can improve it.) Troll 2 is best watched in a double feature with Best Worst Movie for added context. It’s really a bad movie, but it’s bad in entertaining rather than dull or depressing ways.