Best Worst Movie (the story of Troll 2)

I've always been afraid to work with actors. I'm worry about screwing around with other people's lives, their hopes and dreams, and humiliating them on screen.

I'm watching a documentary called Best Worst Movie, about the movie Troll 2, shot in Utah with an Italian director, starring a little Mormon kid and a dentist from Alabama.

The Mormon kid thought it was his big break, a starring role in a feature film!

He shot the film. It was a lot of work. Took three weeks.

A year later, he unwrapped his Christmas present, and it was his movie! The title was made up well after the fact, so it took him a moment to recognize it. He was so excited! He put it in the VCR and watched as his dreams of glory evaporated.

I've heard other stories sort like that.

There was a guy on This American Life. He had been chosen to appear on the show, Zoom, in the 1970s. They hired him. It was announced over the intercom at his school. His family was having financial problems and he imagined how he would save them.

Then they fired him. He never knew why.

He had always been an outcast at school. When he got the part on the show, he was popular. Then he was fired and he was an even bigger outcast. He had to come up with some explanation for why he was fired, so he had several stories he told, and now he couldn't remember what was true and what wasn't. He was trying to sort of the truth.

Did they fire him and tell him they wanted him to come back next season?

Did they tell him that they had one too many boys and needed to get rid of one, and they already had one with the same name as him?

Was it because he said the rugby shirts they wore on the show "sucked"?

He interviewed the guy who fired him. He was...well, maybe he was sorry, but he had no memory at all of it. He was shown a picture of the kid as a child. Nope. Still no memory.

The kid was haunted and tormented for years by this. No one else remembered.

One of the actors in Troll 2 had been a mental hospital outpatient at the time it was filmed. His memory of the movie was that there was this little Mormon kid in it who just annoyed the hell out of him. He had a scene where he's trying to force the kid to take a bite of something, and he said he actually wanted to shove it down the poor kid's throat.


Of course, it was no picnic for the director. He was Italian. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that the movie had a cult following in the U.S. He remembered how badly received it had been. Critics hated it. He thought this was his vindication.

He arrived in America for a special screening of the film. As the film started, the audience laughed at all the things that were supposed to be funny. But they kept laughing. At the stuff that was supposed to be scary. He couldn't understand it.

As it went on, he was angry at the actors who were talking to the audience about the making of the movie. One actor couldn't understand what happened to the part he filmed. There was no explanation for what happened to his character. They just sort of stopped filming his role. It was obviously a sign of how incompetent the director was.

The director explained that the actor was so bad that they cut his part.


Well. So. You have disappointed audiences, disappointed actors, a disappointed director. Then, later, amused and delighted audiences, actors who embraced their failure and blamed it on the writer and director, and then the again-disappointed director and his wife who wrote the script.