Best Worst EVER!!!!!

"Troll 2 is a film that examines many serious and important issues like eating, living and dying. It's an important film which talks about the family, the union of the family, resisting all of those things that want to see it dead. People want to eat this family." - Claudio Fragasso, director of Troll 2, in Best Worst Movie

In general, I like the Internet. It gives us things like email and blogs, and easy access to airline tickets and pornography. But sometimes it annoys me. This is especially true when it comes to its propensity to declare something--anything, really--"The best/worst (fill in the blank) ever!!!!!" This is doubly annoying when the thing being declared has been around for ages, but then someone at, say, the Huffington Post will come across it, and make it sound like their crack investigative team discovered it in some tomb, dug it up, and is proudly sharing it with the masses.

Such was the case with the Troll 2 fervor this past year. Thanks to Best Worst Movie, as people across the country were discovering this quaint little film about a boy and his family who unwisely vacation in the town of Nilbog, and are attacked by goblins who want to turn them into vegetables to eat, and raving about it (well, you know, raving about it in the ironic, detached, hipster sense of the word), I, and I'm sure many others, were like, "Well, yeah, this movie has been around forever. Where the fuck have all of you been?"

And just to be clear, I'm not playing the film snob card here. It's not like I considered Troll 2 some sort of obscure movie, known only to me and a handful of other horror nerds. Hell, HBO used to run it ten times a week, back when it was so hard up for programming, a night of movies might well consist of Troll 2, The Beastmaster and Body Slam, the latter two co-starring Tanya Roberts. (I would trade the current highbrow HBO for the HBO of 20 years ago in a heartbeat.)

And the thing is, it's really not the worst movie ever. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's horrible. It's poorly written, abysmally acted, and this particularly infamous line-read deserves all the scorn in the world.

But there are worse films. Troll 2, for all its faults, has a beginning, a middle and an end. It has competent cinematography. It has a decent plot. (And frankly, given the thousands of movies that have been made about people-eating creatures, I can't think of any other one where the creatures first turn people into plants to eat, so that was kind of creative.) It has passable special effects for a really low-budget '80s horror movie.

And honestly, it kind of has a cool ending, which sadly, doesn't seem to be on YouTube. Not in English, anyway. But in a nutshell, Joshua, the kid in the film, walks into his family's kitchen and discovers a bunch of goblins eating the green pulp that used to be his mother. One of them looks up and says, "Want some, Joshua?" Joshua screams. End of movie.

I've gotten worse films from Netflix. Far worse. Some of them look like they were shot using a camera the director found at a garage sale. Some of them seem like they were made without an actual script. And then, you have movies like Batman and Robin or Battlefield Earth or Jonah Hex, which are also terrible, but had much better actors and a budget a thousand times bigger than Troll 2's. So if we're awarding titles like Worst Movie Ever, shouldn't those be considered before Troll 2?

On Rotten Tomatoes, Troll 2 has a 0% rating among movie critics, making it the lowest-rated film ever made. Roger Ebert said, "A critic could become the most-hated person in fan circles by awarding it even half a star and spoiling the perfection of that zero." I really hope someone does, because it's not the worst film ever made, no matter how much the Internet wants it to be.