More EIFF coverage here — this time an interview with Michael Stephenson, child star of so-bad-it's-great cult fave Troll 2 and now the director of Best Worst Movie, a very enjoyable documentary about the Troll 2 phenomenon.* * * * *
In 1987, Michael Stephenson was nine years old and starting to get work as a child actor — mostly he was appearing in stage plays, but he had landed a TV commercial as well. Not bad, considering his family was living in Utah rather than New York or Los Angeles. Then, word came down from his agent that a production company was coming to town to film a horror movie with a great role for a nine-year-old boy. It seemed like Stephenson’s big break, and he leapt at the chance to audition in Park City for the film’s director, an autocratic Italian named Claudio Fragasso.
“I remember going into this hotel room filled with wall-to-wall smoke,” Stephenson says, “and everyone speaking Italian. All of a sudden, Claudio emerged from the smoke, knelt down, and said, ‘Okay, Michael — now we improvise!’ So he would say, ‘Pretend there’s a scary spider on your face!’ And I would scream. And he’d say, ‘Pretend you’re in a scary house!’ And I screamed again. Basically I was screaming a lot for him. And at the end, he looked at me and said, ‘That is all — you may go.’ Couple of days later, my agent called and said, ‘Congratulations! Michael got the lead role of Joshua in this movie!’ So we celebrated that night. We were so excited.”
What neither Michael, his parents, nor his agent realized at the time was that the film he’d been cast in was Troll 2, a movie whose peculiar premise, low-budget special effects, tin-eared dialogue, horribly misjudged performances, and, shall we say, unusual take on the dynamics of the American family would briefly make it the lowest-rated title on the entire Internet Movie Database. Some would call it the worst film ever made.
And young Michael Stephenson was its star.
It wasn’t until a few years after making it, however, that Stephenson realized how badly the project had turned out. His family had discovered a VHS copy of Troll 2 — it was called Goblins during production, but was opportunistically retitled in order to piggyback on the success of a 1986 movie called Troll — and given it to him as a Christmas present. The family gathered around the TV set to watch it, and it didn’t take long for Stephenson to realize that maybe this movie hadn’t turned out as well as he thought it would.“We were just seconds into it,” he says, “and my dad had his head in his hands and was going, ‘Oh, Michael — you’ve made a bad movie.’ It wasn’t like I ran to the corner and cried; it was just embarrassing. Now, I thought that maybe if I just turned away from it and never looked at it, it would go away. But it didn’t!”
It sure didn’t. Troll 2 kept turning up on cable over and over again, its nonsensical story of a young boy who saves his family from being turned into plants and eaten by vegetarian goblins with the assistance of his dead grandfather and a double-decker bologna sandwich playing to perplexed viewers across America. And a strange thing happened: the film is so peculiar, and yet so weirdly watchable, that it started to acquire fans. For a certain kind of connoisseur of trash culture, Troll 2 was a priceless find: a film made in a spirit of utter seriousness, but which manages to fail, hilariously, on every conceivable level. Admirers began holding informal Troll 2 screenings and converting new disciples; fan sites took root on the internet; one character’s particularly melodramatic reading of the line, “They’re eating her... and then they’re going to eat me! Oh my Gooooooooooooooood!” became a classic online meme.
Now 31, Michael Stephenson has overcome his initial embarrassment and embraced his Troll 2 quasi-stardom. He has even directed a very entertaining documentary, Best Worst Movie, which tells the story of the film’s creation, analyzes the rise of the Troll 2 cult, and tracks down the director, the screenwriter, and several members of the cast, most of whom are not professional actors (and those who are tend to omit Troll 2 from their résumés). The central figure is George Hardy, who played father Michael Waits in Troll 2 and never made another film. These days, he’s a dentist with a thriving practice in Alabama, but he’s such a natural ham that for a time, he pretty much becomes the public face of the Troll 2 cult, appearing at any Troll 2 screening that will have him, and delivering his catchphrase — “You can’t piss on hospitality!” — to anyone who will listen.
“He actually sells Troll 2 from his dental office,” Stephenson says with an affectionate laugh. “I knew early on when I started the documentary that I didn’t want to hang the camera on myself. I wanted it to be much more a character-driven thing than a behind-the-scenes exposé. I just didn’t know who that character would be. And then, at the first Troll 2 screening we went to in New York, I was there with George, and there was this line around the block. We didn’t even realize it was for Troll 2. And when people saw George, they just went crazy! I looked at George’s face, which just brightened up — he said, ‘Michael! This is amazing! Come on!’ “Well, from that moment on, I knew this was the guy for the story. Yesterday he was giving root canals, and today he’s hanging out with hundreds of people who adore him for who he is. To me, George is the embodiment of Troll 2 and what makes it special, and that’s that it is so genuine. George is, hands down, the most genuine person you could ever hope to meet. He is so authentic and so sincere. It’s an amazing quality.”
But Stephenson knew that Best Worst Movie couldn’t just be all “butterflies and bliss” — he didn’t want the film to merely be a Troll 2 rah-rah exercise. And indeed, not all of his encounters with the Troll 2 team are entirely cheerful. There’s a melancholy visit, for instance, with actress Margo Prey, who played his mom in the film, who now spends her days taking care of her aged mother, quietly nursing dreams of getting back into acting one day. (At one point, she claims that Troll 2 belongs the same tradition as those great old classics starring Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, which makes one wonder if she tried to watch Troll 2 but rented Sabrina or The Philadelphia Story by mistake.)
Even odder are Stephenson’s encounters with Claudio Fragasso and screenwriter Rossella Drudi, both of whom remain solidly convinced that Troll 2 is a great film, and that its newfound popularity is evidence that people are finally catching on to its serious message. Troll 2 screenings are very warm, affectionate events, with Fragasso’s sour personality providing the only awkward moments. Of all people, shouldn’t he realize that you can’t piss on hospitality? But Stephenson is more forgiving of Fragasso's behaviour.
“That’s one of the reasons why Troll 2 is what it is,” he says. “They were and are so serious. Claudio will never say, ‘I made a horrible movie.’ He made this film with a lot of heart, and you know what? I can’t even say that Troll 2 is a bad film anymore, because I’ve seen over and over again the way it never fails to leave an impression. You think of all the films that try to find an audience and which try to entertain and which have huge budgets — think of how many of them set out to make an impression only to fall short. And then I look at Troll 2, and even though it wasn’t intended to succeed in the way that it has, there’s no denying it’s left an impression. For me, that is something special. As a director, I feel the worst thing you can do is to fail to entertain. And Troll 2 does not fail to entertain.”And maybe that’s the lesson we can all take away from Troll 2 and Best Worst Movie: even the worst, most embarrassing moments in our lives are nothing to be ashamed of. “I think one of the reasons why people are able to enjoy Best Worst Movie,” Stephenson says, “is that everybody looks back on their lives and they’ve done something stupid or dumb that they regret and which seemed like the worst thing ever. But then there comes a moment where you realized, ‘Actually, that event helped make me who I am. I should embrace that.’ Life is too short to take yourself so damn seriously all the time.
"And surprisingly, Troll 2, something that was so bad and which embarrassed me for so long, has actually allowed me to meet more great people and have more positive experiences than anything else in my life. Telling this story has been a very great blessing.”
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