Cat's Eye/Troll 2
Click to viewI was reminded of Troll 2 when I saw the Stephen King anthology Cat's Eye a couple of days ago on TV. While the first two stories are adaptations of blackly comic crime stories from King's Night Shift collection. I missed the first one "Quitters Inc.", featuring James Woods who finds out the hard way that the new anti-smoking program he joined resorts to Mafioso-style punishments if he has a smoke. My one regret about missing it is missing the scene where a nicotine-deprived Woods hallucinates all the people at the party he's at are in fact giant cigarettes milling around to a cover of the Police's "Every Breath You Take".
No instead I came in with "The Ledge" where Robert Hays plays a tennis player with the bad sense to cuckold a gangster. The man wagers that all will be forgiven if Hays can walk completely around the 5 inch ledge that completely encircles the gangster's penthouse...forty feet up. It's okay, though needlessly stretched out with pigeons attacking, Hays dangling from electric signs etc. The final and strangest choice to wrap up the anthology is "The General" where the cat that's been lurking around the corners of the last two tales takes center stage as a pet defending Drew Barrymore from a breath-stealing goblin that lives inside the walls of her home.
It's genuinely inexplicable why King who wrote the screenplay decided that the best way to put together an anthology featuring two of his crime stories to finish with a an idiotic retread of Gremlins. The troll itself is a unscary if technically impressive bit of special effects by Carlo Rambaldi, but I burst out laughing when the troll began making noises, as they're provided by voice actor Frank Welker, a man whose career resides on making animal noises (and also being the voice of Fred on Scooby Doo, and Megatron on Transformers). That in itself is not funny, but the fact the sounds are very recognizably the same Frank Welker uses as Nibbler on Futurama is. Whether Matt Groening and co. specified he used those sounds as an obscure in-joke, or Welker just used those particular sounds because it's not like anyone really bothers to watch Cat's Eye anyways, either way it's amusing.
Though for the record, the cat that's the nominal star is the best thing in the film, though that should be no surprise.
Anyways, as bad as Cat's Eye is, it's still much better than the notorious Troll 2. Originally filmed on a micro-budget as Goblins by an Italian movie crew who shot in America with untrained actors and told them to say the dialogue verbatim. It's considered one of the worst yet unintentionally funniest movies ever made, and it's quite a feat that something this bad has been produced in the last 20 years, where even the worst film tries throwing in some self-mocking irony thereby ruining the sort of unintentional hilarity that can arise from the overly earnest.
Anyways, someone edited together a highlight reel of Troll 2. It's all here: Midgets in immobile rubber masks; An evil seductress using corn-on-the-cob to seduce the husband; dialog like "He's not a little shit, he's sensitive!"; a nerd giving the least enthused line reading over the realization he's about to die; a kid deciding to save his family from eating poisoned food by pissing on the food(!); and much, much, more...
I dare you to watch the entire ten minutes.