Now, I saw the original "Troll" a few years ago, and I remember a few people telling me that the sequel was better, so I was mildly interested in checking this movie out. you have to understand that "better" is a relative term, since the original "Troll" was such a huge pile of shit that it would be hard for anything to be worse than that, so indeed, this movie is better, and it was a ton of fun to watch (I laughed my ass off more than once) but I can't in good conscience recommend it to people like a normal movie. It's not "good" in any way that will be meaningful to much of the moviegoing public.
During the opening sequence, I was mocking the young actor playing the little boy who is the hero of this movie, thinking he was a terrible actor, but the joke was on me, because he's actually the BEST actor of the bunch here, and everyone else is so terrible and wooden that you'll soon be begging for the little boy to be in MORE scenes. Not only that, the script is so horrendously bad, it almost seems like most of the lines were written as jokes, like the screenwriters got drunk and high one night and wrote the script as a prank, but the filmmakers weren't smart enough to realize this, so they kept the script as written (I don't think I saw an editor in the end credits, and if he was there, he's probably been drug out into the street and shot long ago for his conduct in this movie).
There's more wrong with this movie than just the dialogue, too. Seriously, the premise of this movie isn't even remotely believable. A young boy's grandfather died, but the boy keeps seeing his grandfather appearing to tell him stories that warn him of Goblins, but the grandfather never bothers to speak in a straight sentence and say "look, goblins exist and they're coming after you, here's what to do to protect yourself." No, the useless ghost sits around telling stories and doesn't bother to speak up in any helpful manner until ti's too late and several people have died (but they were all annoying, so we don't care much). Lazy worthless ghost. And since when do farming families from small towns switch lives with families in big cities for a week for no apparent reason? Maybe for a reality show, but this movie was made long before the dawn of reality TV. And what family is going to encourage their teenage daughter to bring her boyfriend along with her on a family vacation? "Here honey, you and Billy have fun having sex all night! Here, use mommy and daddy's bed!" It's just absurd on every level. These characters never act like real people. I would have thought this was awesome when I was ten years old, but I'm a little old for these kinds of shenanigans nowadays.
And yet I had fun with this movie. It was too much fun laughing along at all the horrible crap happening onscreen, and if I had a ten year old, I'd watch this movie with my kid so we could laugh along together. That's the biggest endorsement I can give. those with a smidgen of maturity and common sense should probably stay away from this movie.
