Wow! Such a good movie.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Michael Stephenson sets out to exorcise the ghost of his child performance in entertainingly bad classic Troll 2. In so doing he reacquaints himself with the cast and the small but dedicated fan base. Despite the cast being the strangest group of people you would ever meet the result is surprisingly conventional and boring. I'm not sure whether it is because Stephenson wished to spare his fellow cast members unnecessary embarrassment or (more likely) lack of their willingness to participate, but he chooses to focus his attention on George Hardy, the lead in Troll 2 who is now a dentist. Other members of the cast and crew are viewed only fleetingly so we find out very little about them or their stories. George comes across as a thoroughly nice chap if not the most interesting, but it is asking a lot for him to bear the weight of an entire documentary. He seems game enough, attempting to drum up business for certain Troll 2 events by going door to door, reciting his most famous lines from the film to all and sundry. But as he himself says "It gets old real quick".One gets the impression that Stephenson had very much a "Spinal Tap" approach, inter cutting shots of the hapless hero with perplexed reactions, as in the scene where George is speaking at a sci-fi convention and the camera then pans the audience and we see about 6 not very interested people. This seemed a little unkind to George so perhaps the others were wise not to want more involvement.But the real problem is the lack of material. George repeats the same line over and over again and a few fans repeatedly say "Wow Troll 2" This documentary runs out of legs a least half an hour before its end.

The film Troll 2 has become something of a cult item in the last five or six years. It's one of the movies that truly defines the term 'so bad it's good'. It's a consistently ridiculous film that is so very amusing because it so clearly never intentionally tries to be funny at any point. Its mixture of earnest endeavour, cinematic hopelessness and general strangeness aligns it alongside the much-loved yet utterly inept work of Ed Wood. It's really a very rare occasion for any film to achieve the very specific anti-brilliance of Troll 2. So with this in mind, it only seems right that a documentary has been made to celebrate its existence.It focuses mainly on two things. The people involved in the making of the film and the audiences it has subsequently attracted. What it doesn't do – and this is a mistake in my opinion – is tell us how the movie came to be made in the first place. It doesn't even answer the question that many people find the most obvious – why is it called Troll 2 when there aren't any trolls in it? I think the story of Troll 2 warranted a little more historical context and background info, as much of the facts are fascinating in themselves.That said I did enjoy Best Worst Movie and think it's great it was made at all. I remember back in 2005 Michael Stephenson the director and child star in the film frequented the IMDb boards with other cast members and he did say back then that he was planning on making this very documentary. I must say I thought it would never happen but fortunately I was incorrect. George Hardy, the father in the film, emerges as a real star; a very likable man who seems to have lapped up his bizarre fame. Although the real main man of the piece turns out to be director Claudio Fragasso. Every time he was on screen was gold. He was a living embodiment to what made Troll 2 so entertaining in the first place, i.e. committed artistic seriousness and a refreshing lack of irony. Fragasso truly believed that Troll 2 was loved so much because it was a complex family drama. Although he at least didn't go as far as to compare it with Casablanca as Margo Prey did without any sense of jest. Prey was clearly a disturbed woman. But then so was Don Packard, the man who played the drugstore owner, he in fact was an out-patient at a sanatorium when the film was made. So this is surely an example of fact being as strange as fiction. Well, almost.Best Worst Movie is ultimately a perfect accompaniment to Troll 2 itself. The documentary somewhat strangely does not really focus on the content of the film itself. There are numerous clips of course but they're never commented on and many of the best parts are bizarrely not featured in the first place. This would perhaps be more of a problem if you didn't have the movie itself to enjoy afterwards. Ultimately Best Worst Movie is a look at a group of people who were inadvertently involved in making a movie that not one of them could have imagined in their wildest dreams would go on to become something of a cult classic. It's a strange story but one worth knowing about.

Best Worst Movie isn't what I expected it to be. In publicizing it, its maker and its subject gave interviews in which they recounted their experiences as actors in the movie Troll 2 15 years ago, and I expected BWM to be an expansion on those accounts: a thorough history of T2's making. But BWM includes very little information on that, less than what was in the interviews, even though it had the director, the writer, and the entire cast to draw from. It doesn't, for example, tell how T2 came into being, how it was financed, its director--an Italian--came to shoot in Utah, how he assembled the cast, and so on. A viewer who didn't know T2 wouldn't be able to piece together the story from the evidence here. Instead BWM concentrates on one of the T2 actors--a one-shot actor--traveling around the country to make personal appearances in what appears to be a touring revival of T2, primarily for the benefit of the cult it has gained since its making. But apart from one fan's account of how his cell came into being, BWM is short on facts even about the cult.So what does it show? It shows the one-shot actor telling people he once was in a bad movie and recapitulating his dialogue from it for the audiences at the revival showings. It also shows fans doing the kinds of things fans do: quoting lines from the movie, wearing homemade replicas of the costumes, and so on. A very little of this is entertaining--about enough for a five-minute feature on a TV magazine. But Best Worst Movie goes on for 18 times that length (30 times, if one counts the extras on the DVD). It's overkill. Worse yet, amidst all the repetition a somewhat unpleasant outlook comes to make itself felt. BWM likes to stare and point at people. It doesn't have the sympathy to look beyond the obvious and perceive anything more in them, or the curiosity to find out. It's satisfied to stare. And it seems to divide the objects of its attention into two categories: Geeks and Freaks. The Geeks--the members of the fan cult--are Okay. The Freaks--those who don't like T2, or like it in the wrong way, or belong to some different cult--are Not Okay. Thus one of the actresses from T2, who gave the nearest thing to a successful performance in it but has now become, or perhaps always was, a jittery recluse, isn't given leisure to explain herself, and her invalid mother, who is in no way unusual for a person at her time of life in her state of health (and has nothing to do with anything except that she happened to be on scene), is treated as a freak, whereas the movie validates people who put on goblin get-ups, gobble down green-dyed cakes, and re-enact scenes from a 15-year-old bad movie. I submit that the life of that invalid mother, her reclusive daughter, or any of the other people the film shows as marginal--if someone had the interest and sensitivity to bring them out--could be shown to have more value than the adolescent nonsense BWM chooses to celebrate. Consider the case: The moviemaker called on his hermitlike former castmate with no warning, she welcomed him into her house--and then he crapped on her. He lured the director of T2 to this country with a promise that he would see his movie appreciated at last--and then not only his appreciators but his former cast crapped on him. He's shown becoming quite testy about it, and no wonder; that kind of treatment is a betrayal. Hence, in the end the taste Best Worst Movie left in my mouth was more worst than best.

Best Worst Movie is a documentary about the people who made the movie Troll 2, and the fans who love it. Troll 2 is a ridiculous movie and is considered one of the worst ever made. It is pointed out numerous times that every aspect of the film was poorly done--the story, the acting, the effects, not to mention that it is NOT an official sequel to the first movie, Troll, or that there are no Trolls in the movie.The documentary was done by the actor who played the central character in the movie, Joshua. He connects with most of the cast members to discuss what directions their lives have taken, giving most of the screen time to the actor who played the dad (he has a successful dental practice). Friends and family continually praise this guy, George Hardy, as being one of the nicest people you'll ever meet and a pillar of his community, but over the course of the movie I got pretty sick of listening him talk about himself. The actress I was most interested in hearing from was the crazy lady who lived in the church, but they make no mention of her.The documentary doesn't contain any making-of footage. Some of the actors share memories of filming, but most of the time is spent listening to fans talk about how much they enjoy Troll 2 and all the ways they pay tribute to it. Personally, I thought Troll 2 was kind of a depressing movie, but you will meet people who have found it to be a joyful, life-affirming experience.There were some people you will definitely remember in this doc. The woman who played the mother, Margo Prey, comes off as a very troubled person. The director, Claudio, keeps insisting that the movie is not only good, but contains some deep allegory about the family unit. I couldn't decide if he was totally delusional or just had different cultural values. And the guy who played the store owner admits on camera that he was so wacked during the making of the movie that he contemplated killing the child actor he played opposite of (who is now the man that filmed the interview in which this was admitted).I can't really fault this documentary for spending as much time as it did on the cult status of the movie, but I was hoping for more of the history behind its making. Also, I got really sick of hearing George repeat the line about p###ing on hospitality (and George got sick of saying it). 5 out of 10.