Troll (1986)
Directed by: John Carl Buechler
Starring: Noah Hathaway, Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hack, Jenny Beck, June Lockhart, Sonny Bono, Phil Fondacaro, Brad Hall, Anne Lockhart, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Gary Sandy
Troll 2 (1990)
Directed by: Claudio Fragasso
Starring: Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey, Connie Young, Robert Ormsby, Deborah Reed, Jason Wright, Darren Ewing, Jason Steadman, David McConnell, Gary Carlson, Mike Hamill, Don Packard, Christina Reynolds, Glenn Gerner
Before I turn you into a tree, can I fix you a martini?
Produced by Charles Band and Empire Pictures, Troll is a bizarre little film that takes its villain from Norse mythology and Scandinavian folk tales, although I guarantee you won’t confuse it with those stories, or anything from the world of Tolkien. Directed by John Carl Buechler, a makeup effects man who would go on to direct Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood, it’s an underwhelming, mediocre piece of dark fantasy about a sneaky troll who slowly takes over an apartment building made up of 80s era malcontents, like yuppies, swingers, and Nam veterans. Into this building moves the Potter family, with daddy played by Michael Moriarty (a Larry Cohen favorite), mom played by Shelley Hack (who would appear in The Stepfather a year later), little girl Wendy Anne (Jenny Beck, looking like Heather O’Roarke’s lost twin), and her older brother Harry (Noah Hathaway). Yes, that’s right – his character’s name is Harry Potter, Jr, and this movie arrived over a decade before J.K. Rowling flooded the world with those damned books
Continue reading
, likening it to a geek show where “stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object.” That’s exactly what Manos is – some kind of object, a horrible-but-fascinating object, looking like a movie, but in reality being closer to an anti-movie. Give it any amount of stars you wish, or don’t give any – like Ed Wood’s 
, they are all accurate. You see, once upon a time, in 1966, a fertilizer salesman named Harold P. Warren made a bet with screenwriter Stirling Silliphant that he could make a successful horror movie on a very low budget. As Warren had no experience in filmmaking, this was a very bad bet. However, his experience with fertilizer came in handy, since he managed to deliver the cinematic equivalent. Manos: The Hands of Fate is so inept, weird, and surreal, it’s like the movie was made by desert freaks on some kind of weekend bender. If the Manson family filmed a movie at Spahn Ranch, it might look something like Manos.