WORST MOVIE SMACKDOWN

There seems to be some debate over what is the WORST MOVIE of all time.  Of course, I’m not talking about those awful low budget student productions which are so bad, they’re just bad.  I’m talking about the movies which are soooooo bad, they’re really really good.   And we have two contenders.

In one corner, we have The Room (2003).  This is Tommy Wiseau’s masterpiece which deals with the passion and the pain of a modern romance that ends in tragedy.  With scenes that go nowhere, transitions that leave you scratching your head, actors who don’t understand the concept of subtlety and some very icky sex scenes, NOT TO MENTION a lead actor who looks like a long-haired Quasimodo, The Room has all the right ingredients to make something so wrong. 

But equally fierce, I would like to present you with Troll 2 (1990) which has a cast of vegetarian goblins who make unsuspecting visitors eat green food so that they turn into plants.  In this movie, we learn that a kick in the groin can make you into a “homo” and coffee is the “devil’s drink”.  The most frightening aspect of this movie is that the director found money and people to make this disaster. 

As far as I know, both movies were meant to be serious movies.  The Room was meant to be a drama and Troll 2 was apparently meant to be terrifying.  But that’s what makes them great WORST MOVIES.  If the directors had tried to make them as bad as they turned out to be, they never would have been as good.  Or as bad.  Which is good. 

I think. 

But only one movie can be the WORST MOVIE so I took a very analytical approach to come up with a winner.  I’ve compared these two movies with regards to the common goods we look for in our so-bad-they’re-good movies.

Here are the results:   

Gratuitous sex and nudity:  The Room gets off to a banging start with a scene that looks and sounds like a 70s porno.  There is soft music, a red rose, weird moans and entangled limbs all shot through the gauzy filter of the bed’s canopy.  And did I mention there is butt clenching?  Yes, my friends, there is MALE BUTT CLENCHING that just doesn’t stop.  At least, it didn’t seem to stop.  This scene is repeated a couple of times throughout the movie and it doesn’t get any more tolerable by the third time.

I don’t recall if there is any nudity in Troll 2 but they probably would have had to pay the actors more if there had been a nipple shot so they probably avoided it.  They do, however, have a sex scene which is just about the weirdest sex scene I have ever seen in my life.  It involves corn and popcorn and well, you just have to see it because I’m not sure if I could describe it.  I have no idea what the popcorn had to do with anything except perhaps to remind audiences that they should buy more concessions or take a bathroom break. 

The Room gets the edge.  Did I mention the butt clenching?  Ugggghhhhhh ….

Catchy One –Liners:  The Room has got so many great one-liners that you can purchase a bobble-headed doll of Tommy Wiseau that spouts them out.  My co-worker has one and this is how I was first acquainted with the movie.  Here are some of my favorites …

“I’m fed up with this world!”

“Don’t touch me mothafucka!” 

“You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” 

“The candles, the music, the sexy dress. I mean, what's going on here?”

By themselves, these quotes may not sound like much but you have to hear them with the main character’s voice which is a cross, in my humble opinion, between a Jersey accent and an Eastern European trash accent.  Yep, it’s as bad as you might imagine.  Who sounds like this?  Okay, you’re right.  I guess Tommy Wiseau does and who the hell knows where he grew up. 

Troll 2 also has its fair share of great one-liners. 

“I’m the victim of a nocturnal rapture.  I have to release my lowest instincts with a woman.” 

“Grandpa!  Are you really in hell?” 

“And you can’t piss on hospitality!  I WON’T ALLOW IT!” 

“Joshua is not a little shit; he’s just very sensitive.” 

I’m gonna go with Troll 2.  Although The Room has some great lines and there are bonus points for the obnoxious accent with which they are delivered, there seems to be more variety and bite with Troll 2. 

Awful Acting:  You can’t have the one-liners if you don’t have the atrocious delivery.  Tommy Wiseau is just plain dreadful as the lead character in The Room.  When I was watching him, I got the feeling that a dog turd would have more emotional range.  When he actually tries to emote, it comes off as hysterically funny such as when he has a breakdown at the end of the movie.  He lets out these loud groans which sound like he has a bad hairball caught in his throat and then he trashes his apartment like an enraged Frankenstein.  He is supported by an equally awful cast.  The actress who played Lisa should get an annual razzie for her portrayal of the cheating girlfriend and her mother who “definitely has breast cancer” spits out her monologues as if she is reading off a teleprompter.  I pity the guy who played Mark (Greg Sestero) who probably regrets ever being credited in this disaster. 

Troll 2 has a uniformly horrible cast.  From the overzealous dad who takes his family to a town inhabited by Goblins to the grandpa who has the creepiest pedophile grin I’ve ever seen in a movie, there is not one redeeming actor in the bunch.  All the lines are delivered in an inappropriate way and a special mention should go to the wicked witchy lady who has never met a piece of dialogue that she didn’t want to punctuate with crazy eyes and weird smiles.  Thankfully, most of these actors realized that they shouldn’t give up their day jobs.  At the screening of Troll 2, George Hardy (who played the dad) was there and he is now a dentist in Alabama.  Good choice, George. 

I’m gonna give the nod to Troll 2.  Tommy Wiseau is in a league all of his own but as an ensemble, Troll 2 should get the award.
 

Outrageous Plot: The Room is really a very simple movie and without the bad acting, the unrealistic dialogue, the heaving body parts, it is quite boring.  It’s about a girl who doesn’t love her boyfriend anymore so she decides to sleep with his best friend.  The boyfriend finds out about her cheatin’ ways and he *SPOILER ALERT* blows his head off in slow motion.  Everyone is sad and that’s the end.

Troll 2 is just completely f*#@ng nuts.  It’s about a family who goes on a vacation to Nilbog which is a town that is full of goblins.  Not trolls but goblins.   (The reality is that there aren’t any Trolls in Troll 2).  *SPOILER ALERT*  These goblins are vegetarian so they turn people into plants and then eat them.  How great is that?!  I’ll give them points for such a gruesome storyline because after all, I would not want to be turned into foliage and then have my extremities munched on by a bunch of ripened dwarfs.  That is a little terrifying when you think about it.  But then it gets better.  How do you kill these things?  You use a Bologna sandwich which has CHOLESTEROL and TOXINS! 

There is no way that The Room can compete with the madness in Troll 2.  And that Bologna sandwich is a huge plot twist that I didn’t see coming AT ALL.  Kudos to the monsters. 

It’s pretty close.  Both The Room and Troll 2 raise bad moviemaking to a fine art form and I congratulate both of them for their twisted endeavors.  But, like in all those award shows, a winner must be chosen and so, for the WORST MOVIE, I choose ….

Troll 2.  It does everything right … er, I mean wrong.

 And for that, I am thankful.  

Troll 2: The worst movie?

I spent five hours in a theater last night. 

For the first hour and a half, we watched a film called Best Worst Movie which is a documentary about the (supposed) worst film of all time: Troll 2.  In the doc, the filmmaker examined the lives of the people who made this train wreck possible twenty years after it was made.  With this strange mix of people, it is no wonder that Troll 2 became a cult classic. 

The father was played by George Hardy who had no acting background whatsoever.  He is currently practicing dentistry in small town Alabama and obviously loves the attention that Troll 2 has given him.  He was at the screening last night and seemed like a genuinely nice (and very happy) guy.  If a sequel to Troll 2 rolls around, he says he won't hesitate to do it.  God bless this guy for thinking that such creative lightning can strike twice. 

Margo Prey played the mother.  In the documentary, she seemed a little lost, summing up her life by repeating "it's complicated".  She looks after her ailing mother and hopes one day to return to acting.  Hearing her describe her experiences on Troll 2, I got the impression she thought she was working on a true freakin' masterpiece.  The same goes for the Italian director.  I don't think he has embraced the fact that his film has the distinction of being the "world's worst" but at least he has recognized that his film has made an impression on people even if it wasn't the one he expected.   

Following the documentary, there was a Q&A with George Hardy and the filmmaker, Michael Stephenson, who played the boy in the film.  There were some interesting questions in there but I was getting a little antsy when the moderator, Jeff Goldsmith, dragged everything on for over an hour.  I wanted to ask, "When are you going to play the damn film?" but I just sat in my seat and kept quiet. 

And finally, they played TROLL 2. 

A couple of things about this film.  It's definitely NOT the worst film I have seen.  That distinction belongs to several indie dramas which I have seen over the years with titles I can't even remember.  However, it is certainly one of the most bizarre.  The synopsis alone gives you a hint at the strangeness of this little gem. 

A family goes on vacation to a small town called Nilbog.  The family doesn't realize that this town is full of vegetarian trolls (actually, they are called goblins in the film) who prey on humans after they get turned into plants.  The son, aided by the floating head of his dead grandfather, tries to convince his family that the local inhabitants aren't friendly after he discovers that NILBOG is actually GOBLIN spelled backwards.  There is a final showdown between the family and the goblins during which the son uses a double decker bologna sandwich as a weapon.  The baddies are defeated and the family returns to the safety of their hometown. 

Or do they? 

There were a couple of scenes that instantly elevate this movie to cult classic status.  One of my favorites was when the son realizes that his family should not eat the green food so he jumps up on the table and urinates all over the lunch.  This prompts the father (who doesn't understand why his son did this) to throw his son in bed and scream at him, "And you can't piss on hospitality!  I WON'T ALLOW IT!" 

My favorite scene, however, was when the sexy leader of the goblins seduces a teenager with a ... wait for it ... a corncob!  Yep.  You have to see this scene.  They slurp on the corncob together and suddenly, POPCORN starts flying everywhere.  This scene has no bearing on the film whatsoever but I, for one, am glad that they put it in. 

There were even lessons to be learned from this film: 

If a guy gets hit in the nuts, it will turn him into a "homo". 
If you tighten your belt loop, you won't get hunger pains. 
If you are feeling stressed, then try singing "Row, row, row your boat". 
If you're drinking coffee, then you're drinking the devil's drink. 
If you're a victim of nocturnal rapture, then you must release your lowest instincts with a woman. 

My overall thoughts?

The acting was bad but enthusiastic, the screenplay was awful but did try to make some sense, the soundtrack was inappropriate but attempted to echo the tone of the movie and you could tell the director was passionate about the project but could not overcome the monumental silliness. I suppose that's why Troll 2 is so entertaining; they tried hard for something great but failed on every level.

Troll 2 is definitely worth checking out but not by yourself. Get yourself a group of people, get lots of alcohol and enjoy the movie equivalent of a train wreck.

You won't be able to look away.

And don't forget about Best Worst Movie.  Support your filmmakers!