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SPECIAL ATTRACTION: Troll 2 (1990)

I’ve got a theory about Troll 2 that goes beyond its being a quick cash-in sequel to a horror movie that never got made. Any yokel with a dial-up modem can tell you about the film’s special effects, its acting, its camera angles, but I’ve got the facts, man–the real reason Troll 2 was made and why basement-dwelling nerds like myself continue to stream it instantly over Netflix, knowing full well that nothing good will come of it: Troll 2 is the world’s first and only pro-meat horror film.

Think about this for a second. Most horror films, at least back when horror films mattered, came with a moral to smooth out the violence. Sleepaway Camp, for example, would have you not bullying people because of their looks, Friday the 13th warns against the dangers of child negligence by insinuating that the child you let drown today could be the undead, machete-wielding manbaby of tomorrow, and A Nightmare on Elm Street is as anti-vigilante as the Gotham City Police Department around quarterly evaluations. Not that there are a ton of horror films made about 1) the environment or 2) the horrors of eating meat (maybe the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other cannibal-centric films), but Troll 2 nevertheless makes its stand on the issue: Meat good. Veggies bad.

The story, for those of you unfamiliar with Troll 2′s haphazard near-brilliance, is this: Two families, one from the city and one from the middle of nowhere, agree to swap houses so they can experience each other’s life. The youngest of the city folk can speak to his recently deceased grandfather, and like guests of Lando Calrissian, the pair have a bad feeling about rural hospitality. They arrive to a giant banquet, cooked up by the slack-jawed, grumbly locals, only for the grandfather and the little boy to deduce that the food, if eaten, will turn the eater into a tree, trees being the chief sustenance of trolls goblins.

So the little boy is tasked with saving his family from the “delicious” looking food, which is a weird variety of cakes and porridges and other assorted green things. Meanwhile, on the other side of the town of Nilbog (one of the great horror movie town names), an RV of horny teens unaware of the situation are waiting to be made into plant food. They’re easily seduced by a witch, who offers them food and sex, pretty much at the same time.

This, naturally, leads to popcorn.
This, naturally, leads to popcorn.

The truth of the matter is that there’s a pretty decent movie lurking behind Troll 2′s low budget awfulness, and this is the kind of movie that hypothetically begs to be remade: There are enough fans of Troll 2 who’d see a remake that a (small) audience is built in, and the people who come to it blind might go off and watch the original on Netflix, where they’d pretty much get trolled. If Fright Night and every other horror movie ever made can get the remake treatment, I don’t see why, in 2013 or so, I can’t go to a movie theatre and expect a father to ground his son for literally pissing on hospitality.

Yes, there’s some real potential in food horror, particularly in an America where half the people in it are obese and at-risk for diabetes. You make the city folk a troupe of fast food munching, soda slurping suburban slugs and the yokels a group of Eric Northman level hunks, and I’d say you’ve got something. It’d be a weird dichotomy, I suppose, because the hunky rural folk are trying to get the fat slobs to eat their vegetables, but that’s an easy fix: Make everything corn. Americans, myself included, already eat more corn than what’s logical, and there’s an obvious tie in to high fructose corn syrup.

“Gross!” the little boy would say. “I hate corn!”

“Aww,” his father responds, “it’s not that bad. Corn is good for you!”

Meanwhile, in the RV, the witch and the horndog are making popcorn (woe to the screenwriter who leaves that scene out), and the goblins of Nilbog gather around their giant campfire to make a roasted ear of human/corn. Heck, I’m getting shivers just picturing the kid breaking into the witches house, pealing back the leaf and revealing a desiccated, unnaturally yellow teenager. Hospitality’s not the only thing he’ll be pissing on.

As for the reason I’d play this in my hypothetical rep theatre, just check out the above clip: Troll 2 has everything I want from a bad movie–poor acting, unintentionally great lines and a ridiculous plot. Oh sure, people would come just to laugh at Troll 2, and that’s fine. But Troll 2, in its way, is laughing at them: eating popcorn, drinking soda, sex-obsessed and sedentary. That’s just how the goblins want you.

SPECIAL ATTRACTION: Santa’s Slay (2005)

The first thing you need to know about Santa’s Slay is that Bill Goldberg, the man in the red suit, is Jewish. The second thing you need to know about Santa’s Slay is that Santa, the son of Satan, is only nice because he lost a bet to an angel 2,000 years ago; a bet that involved curling. Stop-motion curling.

If I had a movie theatre, I’d play Santa’s Slay every December, along with the likes of Die Hard, Batman Returns, Gremlins and Jingle All the Way–Christmas movies that make for great anti-programming in the face of hours and hours and hours of “I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas,” awkward family dinners, antiquated and unchanged state liquor laws and whatever garbage is lurking at the multiplex, trying to rob you of your hard earned Christmas money. Movies like Gulliver’s Travels come and go; they are the flotsam and jetsam of holiday filmgoing. It takes guts (or, at the very least, a shiteating grin) to turn the fat, jolly old man into a Jewish asskicker from the bowels of hell.

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus!” Naturally, skepticism hounds Santa; the only people who believe in St. Nick anymore are the very young and the advertisers who still plater Santa on Macy’s displays and bottles of Coke. But it’s obvious from the minute Santa kicks the family dog into the ceiling fan: He’s real, and he hates Christmas. Heck, the premise would have worked without the high stakes curling scene. I imagine Santa isn’t too happy that those wooden trains and hobby horses his elves slave over have given way to iPads and Kindles, that Christmas is an economic institution Too Big to Fail, that a society obsessed with body image still doesn’t want a skinny Kris Kringle.

Yeah, all of this is giving Santa’s Slay too much credit. It’s just a movie where Santa rides around in an ox-drawn sleigh, killing people in the most elaborate way a cynical screenwriter can imagine. It’s campy, perhaps shamefully so, but there’s something to be said for camp when its done right. Spare me your cookie cutter holiday movies, hastily and shoddily upconverted to 3D. Spare me your sentimentality. Santa’s Slay is a Christmas movie for people who see through Christmas. Dole out the eggnog and watch the bodycount rise.

SPECIAL ATTRACTION: Teenage Mother (1967)

I’ve secretly always wanted to own a movie theatre. It’s a small, somewhat simple dream, but there it is. I wouldn’t play any first-run things or tremendously popular recent films; it’d all be stuff that I loved or had discovered or could afford. Naturally, this theatre would go out of business in a month, but the glut of trailers on YouTube allow me to imagine a world where I had nothing but spare time and film reels on hand, so here we have SPECIAL ATTRACTION, which I hope will become a regular feature on this blog. What kind of schlock would play at my movie theatre? Stuff like this, maybe…

Yes, Teenage Mother. Somehow this encapsulates everything I love about trashy films. From the voiceover (“TEENAGE MUDDA,” he screams. “SHE’S NINE MONTHS’A TROUBLE”) to the ridiculous dialog throughout (“You’ve got to put out to get back”), there’s just…something about this movie. Let’s break this down a bit…

0:12 In a simpler time, movies like Teenage Mother broke box office records. Supposedly. Despite only being played as a roadside feature, to limited audiences, with the promise of a lecture at the end.

0:25 No, the typewriter has absolutely nothing to do with the story, but I love how the voiceover guy pronounces “Petaluma,” as though it were a word in a strange, secret language. Out of all the articles that could have been written about teen pregnancy in the 1960s, it’s pretty damn random that the one chosen to highlight the problem…is about the donation of orange juice.

0:50 What we have here is maybe the best combination of Title Card and Tag Line in film history…
Means nine months of trouble!

1:33 This is an awesome way to bust someone’s face…
BRUDDA AGAINST BRUDDA

1:56 She really does know how to make all the boys hot…
Chicken wings: never a bad strategy.

2:21 With the line “I can get anyone, even you,” it becomes obvious that the teenage mother in this film is the villain. Oh, the 1960s.

3:43 Here, it looks like Arlene is about to be raped while a group of people she knows watch on, leering. Not only is this the creepiest scene in any trailer, ever, but it’s utterly bizarre that rape would be depicted as “the gang getting even” under any circumstance.

3:56 How does the doctor know that there’s no such thing as “a little pregnant?” Because he’s been doing this for 28 years, that’s how.

4:03 It’s hard to tell, but I think this movie thinks marriage is a worse road than abortion.

4:12 A post-movie lecture featuring “the facts of life” my parents could never tell me? Gee whiz, it’s no wonder this movie’s broken box office records!

Naturally, this movie is in color and Cinemascope. Teenage Mother is the kind of flick that belongs in a time capsule along with the likes of Reefer Madness, an utterly paranoid film whose subject matter is ripped from the headlines, even if those headlines involve the donation or orange juice. Like Reefer Madness, Teenage Mother was touted as an educational film, but one look at Arlene Sue standing around in her bra and panties and you should know better–this is exploitation at it’s worst, adolescent fantasies of consequence-free sex tinged with the sweet taste of revenge on the gender that would end our street racing days with an anchor baby because she didn’t want to have no damned abortion. Do you see how many cats she has sex with, man? How does she know I’m the father?

Conservative and sensationalistic as it may be, Teenage Mother somehow predicted a future where teens ran around and had sex for the sake of having sex, the result being every DNA Testing episode of Maury. The strange thing is that the language hasn’t even changed:

At least Arlene Sue’s sexual proclivities are sending shivers down the spine of the establishment. The kids on Maury…man…they wouldn’t know who the Man was if he challenged them to a fight. Sex now seems to be some selfish pleasure, akin to mowing down a bag of McDonald’s in the car on the way home or blowing your allowance on candy and pop because somebody suggested to save it. Teenage Mother seems almost innocent, and more than a little naive. “A little bit pregnant.” Ha. Here’s a movie that doesn’t know the facts of life in its own post-screening lecture. It just wants to ogle, to slip a Playboy between the pages of a biology textbook and forget about responsibility. So much the better.