NPR on the Appeal of "Troll 2"

NPR has published this article on the ongoing appeal of 1980s B-horror flick Troll 2 and the new documentary, Best Worst Movie.

[Troll 2,] with its cadre of vegetarian monsters turning victims into plants so they could eat them, was understandably never released in theaters. And when Stephenson became a filmmaker himself, he might simply have joined his fellow actors in leaving it off his resume.

George Hardy, the real-life dentist who played Stephenson's dad, for instance, stopped flashing his pearly whites at movie cameras entirely. But then Hardy's patients started saying they'd seen him In a video called Troll 2.

And then people started calling him to say he was on TV.

"Just stop watching it right now," he'd tell them with a laugh. "It gets worse!"

But that, as Best Worst Movie details, was before the discovery that his embarrassing little horror movie has developed a cult of followers who find the film flat-out hilarious — fans throwing Troll 2 parties, beer-powered midnight screenings and such. A piece in The New York Times leads Hardy and Stephenson to a Manhattan screening, where they find a mob scene, as fans greet them with the fervor more mainstream crowds might reserve for De Niro and Scorsese.

Here is a famous clip from Troll 2, popular on Youtube, that gives a sense of the film's flavor.