Troll 2 · Updated & Tested

No human being has ever said the following sentence with a straight face: "They're eating her... and then they're going to eat me... OH MY GOOOOOOOOOOD!" This line, delivered by a young actor as he watches his girlfriend get slowly absorbed into a plant, has achieved immortality. It is the "Rosebud" of the bad movie world.

Have you survived the horror of Nilbog? Drop your favorite terrible movie in the comments. And remember: Don't eat the green food. troll 2

There are goblins. Vegan goblins, to be precise. And that absurd contradiction—a monster movie without its title monster, featuring villains who want to turn people into plants so they don’t have to eat meat—is the perfect gateway into the beautiful, baffling chaos that is Claudio Fragasso’s 1990 masterpiece of incompetence. No human being has ever said the following

I have seen Eraserhead . I have seen The Holy Mountain . I have never been as confused as I was during the scene where a grandpa ghost shows up to hand Joshua a bologna sandwich as a weapon. What makes Troll 2 legendary isn’t just one flaw—it’s a perfect storm of three. It is the "Rosebud" of the bad movie world

Director Claudio Fragasso (under the pseudonym "Drake Floyd") reportedly told his English-speaking cast to act "more American." The result is a cast of children, amateurs, and locals who perform every emotion—fear, joy, confusion—at the same volume: maximum overdrive . The dad, Michael, delivers lines like a man who just realized he left the oven on. The mom, Diana, looks perpetually like she’s smelling a bad egg.

If you’ve never heard of Troll 2 , you’re probably wondering why a 35-year-old Italian B-movie (filmed in Utah with an American cast) still haunts the cultural periphery. The answer is simple: It is the Citizen Kane of bad movies. It is not merely "so bad it’s good." It is so aggressively, sincerely, and spectacularly wrong that it loops all the way back around to genius. A wholesome American family, the Waits, swaps houses with a creepy family in the rural town of Nilbog ("Goblin" spelled backwards—yes, the film has to point this out to you). Young Joshua has a vision: the town’s cheerful inhabitants are actually goblins, led by the seductive witch Creedence. Their plan? To feed the family "magic" green slop that will turn them into vegetables (celery, specifically) so the goblins can eat them.