Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. I'm Rob Lamb.
And I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be talking about the ultimate classic of modern B movies, Troll two. This has got to be the one, right, Like, even if you rarely watch B movies, you might have seen this one.
Yeah. This is one of the titans of bad film, of B films, and it's one where on one hand, some listeners might say, Hey, this is only the second episode of Weird House Cinema. I can't believe you're doing Troll two already, But really the reality is we had to go ahead and do Troll too. Otherwise listeners would be asking for it, they would be demanding it, and we had You know, this is just the hospitable thing to do, and we don't piss on hospitality on this show.
I do want to add a quick note some of if you were probably listening to this and you're like, what is Weird House Cinema. What is going on? This is a science and culture podcast. Why are you talking about beef, be movies and weird films? Well, this is something we're trying. This is something we just kicked off. Joe and I have been talking about doing a weird
movie standalone podcast for a while. We were looking at other options, and it was decided, partially by us, partially by powers on High, that we would do this as a little extra episode that airs on Fridays. I don't think they're going to let us publish it at midnight, because I don't think that would be good business. But you can think of it as the midnight offering from Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Right, the principalities and powers to create it must come out in the daytime, but you can still enjoy it in the daytime. Watch the movie at night and then listen in the day.
Yeah, or you can skip it. If weird films aren't your thing, just skip it and you can watch our core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, which are still going to come out Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Now.
I think it's good to get into try too early in the lifetime of this series because Troll two is a nuclear weapon of thematic theft. It brings all of the themes mainly meat and vegetables are the themes of Troll two. In fact, just before we started recording, we were talking about that obnoxious mid twenty tens bacon craze
where suddenly there was just ironic bacon on everything. You know, there would be like a there's a website called the Art of the Mustache that has a logo with a guy in a top hat in a monocle, and they sell bacon flavored whiskey. And I don't know where all that came from, but I strongly suspect the pork industry.
Yeah. And one place that it did not take root though, is definitely the town of nil Bog. Nil Bog is the setting for the movie Troll two, and this is where the goblins live Nilbog. Of course his goblins spelled backwards. This is a strange town of some we're in America.
We get kind of a Utah feel from this. Yeah, And it's here that we find an American family on vacation running a foul of goblins and an ancient witch who uses stone hinge magic in order to turn people into like vegetable goo so that vegetarian goblins can eat them.
Yes, I would say that is the plot in a nutshell, it's that there are vegetarian goblins who eat people, but they have to turn them from meat into vegetarian green jello before they can eat them, and they worship Stonehenge.
Well, you know, let's just go ahead and listen to a little bit of the audio from the original trailer.
Good lad, I'm sorry we had a small miss out.
Here are the Keyes here.
A nice stay in Millmond.
You in our city.
You're telling the same story, Josh. Goddles don't exist, Gossins don't exist.
And remember thereating good boy, didn't we kids us to like your first love?
Ice cream? Delicious?
And so this is you know, we're talking about what makes a good weird film or a good bad film, et cetera, the kind of film we want to talk about on the show. And really this does have everything. It has a weird plot, it has weird performances, it has it has like just weird choices in how they're going to try and tell this story. It just it just brings it all. And at the same time, it's an exceedingly watchable film, Like there's never a dull moment in Troll Too.
It's impossible to be bored while watching Troll two. Yeah, this is the kind of movie that also it's not just entertaining. It sucks people in. It's like a magnet if you put it on in a house and people are doing things in other rooms that people will come from the other rooms to the troll too. They come from all over to kneel at the foot of stone Hinge. And it's It's also got a kind of cultural sensibility that exists basically nowhere else because it's part very much
italianissimo bad horror. You know, it's very Italian, but it's also very utah and so we were calling it last night Utalian.
Yeah, that's that's that's a good way of looking yeh. Because the filmmakers themselves, most of the crew were Italian. Then the actors are all American and a lot of them are just very local, non actor American. Now, this film came out in nineteen ninety, so I want to set the stage a little bit here. You don't really need to understand what was going on politically or culturally in the world for the most part to understand Troll two. But Troll two is definitely what I refer to as
a Gromlin film. Okay, so it's one of the many, many films about small, mischievous monsters to come out in the wake of nineteen eighty four's Grimlins. So I think if you've ever walked, if you ever walked around a video rental store, you know what I'm talking about. Because we didn't just have Grimlins and then eventually Grimlins too. You had Goolies, you had critters, you had hobgoblins, you had Munchies, and you had these troll films.
I didn't know about Munchies. I had to look it up. It looks gross, it looks yeah, nasty.
So Troll two is marketed as a sequel to the Gromlin film Troll, which came out in nineteen eighty six, which has nothing to do with Troll too. Troll was a Charles Band production, and of course Charles Band is a notable maker of weird films. I think we'll definitely come back to Charles Band on these episodes in the future.
I think he made the puppet Master movies, didn't he.
He did one thing with Charles Band to keep in mind, without small creatures. He does like small creatures, but he was more serious early on in his career, and I think he kind of found a niche later on is making sort of intentionally bad films to a certain extent, you know, certainly once you get into like Evil Bong and the Gingerbread film. What it was a Ginger Dead I'm not I can't remember.
Off hand the ginger dead man that was him.
He did some sort of gingerbread man evil creature thing. Yeah, But before that was Puppet Masters, and then before even that were some films that I hope we'll get back to on this show. But Patrol from nineteen eighty six was definitely an attempt to cash in on the Grimlin craze. It starred the wonderful Michael Moriarty is Harry Potter senior, Yes, firmly establishing Harry Potter as a fictional character prior to the Harry Potter books. Atreyu himself, Noah Hathaway was Harry
Potter Junior in that film. And you also had Julia, Luis Dreyfus and Sonny Bono showing up as various in various roles. But it was not there's no connection here between Troll one and Troll two. Troll two is an Italian production from shock Master Joe Diamatto. That's the producer.
And this is actually something that was pretty common for Italian films at the times, like a lot of Italian horror movies would be marketed as a sequel to an existing movie, even though they had nothing to do with it whatsoever. So, for example, the Italian movie Zombie was marketed as a sequel to Dona the Dead even though it was not made by George Romero, had nothing to
do with Dona the Dead, it just wasn't related. And there are other movies by Claudio Fergosso, the director of Troll two, that were marketed as movies in an existing franchise. So example, they were marketed as like a movie in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, even though they weren't.
Right, and in that case the film in question being night Killer, it was so Texas Chainsaw Masaker had a different title in Italy and then it's the sequel to that. So it's not instantly recognizable to a lot of Western film fans that this would be marketed as a sequel to Texas Chainsaw Masaker.
Yeah, in Italy, Texas Chainsaw was non a pre or I don't know how to pronounce it, non a prete de la puerta, I think, which means like, do not open that door.
Ah, well, that's great. I love a good don't film. All right, Well, let's talk about some of the people of note here. So really one of one of the main two people to focus on is the director himself, Claudio Fergasso born in nineteen fifty one, still very much alive as of this recording and still making films, I believe. While Troll two is probably his most well known film in the US, he's had quite a long career in the Italian film world, with some of his pictures shooting
in the United States. He has thirty director credits forty screenwriting credits, including such notable entries as Monster Dog starring Alice Cooper and then Shocking Dark, which was a Bruno Mattei directed knockoff of Aliens and Terminator, and it's kind of infamous in its own right for being just a blatant knockoff.
Well mainly from what I'm understand, I haven't seen that one. The box art is just the cover of Terminator. I mean it's just, yeah, straight out James Cameron's Terminator, A slight like a traced version of it.
Pretty much.
But the movie is more a ripoff of Aliens, isn't it.
Yeah, Yeah, Like I was watching some clips from it, and it's clearly like, let's go make Aliens, guys, let's do it, but with a much cheaper budget.
Obviously, Aliens was a prolifically ripped off filmy. Like Aliens has more copycats than maybe any other movie I can think of. It really spawned the space marine genre, which was everywhere in the eighties and nineties.
Yeah, I mean it's been ripped off at every level too. It's been ripped off at the shocking dark level. But also just so many films would not exist, Like they're clearly, you know, feeding on that same energy, they're tapping into that same vein.
But now so a lot of the directors, writer directors, AU tours who create horror movies, you might be, I don't know, you might be tempted to kind of just call them hacks, like they're just phoning in some work. They're pointing the camera at things, they're telling the actors what to say, and then they get on with it. I get the feeling from at least Troll two that Fragaso very much sees himself as an artist, and he is in there in the movie.
Yes, yeah, absolutely. So for instance, two of the names already mentioned Joe Diamatto and Bruno Mattei. So Joe Diamatto, I really have enjoyed some of his films, but he was very much a in the business of titillation, like what can I do violently or erotically on the screen that will we'll bring viewers in. And then Bruno and Fragoso points this out as well in interviews, like Bruno was very much like, let's make some money, let's get let's make some money. Let's go do a predator movie.
I'm doing. Let's I'm gonna make aliens, write me a script for aliens. We'll call it shocking Dark, you know, Like that was very much the vibe. But for Gaso, I think one of the things that's fascinating about him is that he, yeah, he did seem to think of himself as as this like legitimate autour. You know, that he had had something to say in these films, and that can be vital to having like a really successful weird film or just a really amusing B film because
somebody cares. I think we've said We've pointed out this out before. To really enjoy a well, any film, but especially a B movie, somebody has to be serious about it. There's got to be an actor in there, or an FX person, a cinematographer. Somebody's got to be serious about saying something with this film.
With Troll two, you really get the feeling that for Gosso, this is not just a plot device. He really means it when he says that evil can only be defeated by the power of goodness and by processed meat, like he really thinks that.
Yeah, because we do have to drive home that just because you have ideas and just because you have something you want to say, it doesn't mean you're capable of creating interesting cinema. It doesn't mean you're capable of actually pushing those ideas through to the finished product. It doesn't mean that those ideas are going to survive the budgetary constraints or the you know or you know, your your limited ability to you know, to cast professional actors in
the role, et cetera. But still you can often see that the effort is there in the finished product, like at some point somebody cared and I should point out that Fragasso seems he seems pretty open about this in recent interviews I've seen with him, where he's like, yeah, I really you know, I I I really thought I was, you know, as a serious filmmaker when I was making a Control Too or or or night Killer or whatever
the case may be. And I think he's kind of like sees like, oh, yeah, maybe I maybe I should have listened a little more to Bruno when he was telling me, No, you're making a horror movie, you're making a slasher movie, you're making a monster movie. Just go out and make it. But you know, he wanted to inject this this art or in this and or this commentary on what he was doing.
You get a sense of art artistic ego also in his work, in the very best classical sense, like a John Milton kind of ego, the person who believes that his message is very important and he's the only one who can say it.
Yeah. Now, of course these are not these films are not just Fragaso's voice. Also there's the voice of his co screenwriter and I believe partner, Rosella Drudi. Now. Drudi was born in nineteen sixty three. Frequent collaborator with her husband and seemed to share his ambition for exploring social commentary and psychology in their films. As John O'Brien pointed out in a recent piece for sci Fi Wire, she described Troll two as a quote ferocious analysis of today's society.
Yeah.
I mean it's definitely about today's society where where you can't get any eggs at the store because the guy there says black and he only gives you unrefrigerated milk.
Yeah, just sitting there on the shelf, that nil bog milk.
It's definitely about today's society where when you move into a new neighborhood, they bring you a cheesecake, but it's made with wild nettles that turn your body into green jello. Definitely, it points out how in society today you can take a month off of work by just calling your boss the night before and saying, Hey, I'm going to be gone for a month. Can you take care of that business for me?
Yeah.
So basically Troll two is just wall to wall wonderful little dialogue exchanges between characters who are supposed to be human, or, at least in the case of the nil Boggians, they're supposed to be goblins pretending to be humans. But everybody says things that no human has ever said, that no human would ever say, things that just don't sound like authentic human dialogue. Like it seems as if the entire movie is actually populated by goblins trying to pass themselves off as human beings.
I want to come back to this point about the lack of verisimilitude later on, because I think that is the defining esthetic feature of the movie, and we should explore that in a bit.
Yes, let's go ahead and go through the rest of the cast. For what it's worth here, we have to mention Michael Paul Stevenson, who plays the boy Joshua Waits, notably, but mostly in terms of troll Too, for making the two thousand and nine documentary Best Worst Movie, which is an exploration of what this film is and where it came from. But he's also directed other things. He directed the twenty seventeen Bob Odenkirk movie Girlfriend's Day.
I saw a Best Worst Movie at a screening here in Atlanta at a local theater, and George Hardy, the actor who plays the father and the family in trol Too, was there to answer questions at the screening. It was really special.
The dentist with the linebacker's job that plays the dad.
Yeah, yes, well I think so. Here's another thing about Troll two, and we should describe the plot in more detail in a minute here, But so it is about a family who goes to this goblin infested town. The family, I think is clearly supposed to be modeled on the family from Poltergeist, because we just recently watched Poltergeist, and I would be shocked if in casting George Hardy they weren't trying to go for Craig T.
Nelson.
Yeah. He is kind of like a you know, bottom basement Craig T. Nelson. Yeah, yeah, and definitely he's great in it as well. But a couple of the real standout performances for me are from, you know, from other characters. For instance, there's an actor by the name of Deborah Reid who plays the witch Credence leonor Gilgod in this particular movie, and this is this is pretty much her only acting role, but she just acts her heart and
face off in every scene. Like you get the impression that Fragaso was just saying, like, I like what you're doing. But go ahead and do it like fifty times what you're doing now, just more, Just give me more of that.
He's like, it's just like.
George Lucas, a faster, louder, more intense.
Yes. But she, but she takes it to heart.
Credence slays in this movie. She is so good she is. It's it's a very melodramatic community theater type performance. But she's the kind of actor who you would see in an amateur community theater production. But she would be the standout actor, head and shoulders above everybody else in that Like, you wouldn't be able to stop talking about her after it was over.
I would say that it is perhaps one of the most memorable overacting jobs of all time. Yeah, it's and it's almost not overacting because it fits in this film perfectly, Like it's it's not like everybody else is doing like a real refined and professional time and she's just hamming it up. No, I mean, this is the perfect place for this level of hamminess.
Uh huh, Now what about I know you wanted to talk about the guy who runs the general store in Nilbog, who the guy who's like, we don't have any bacon her eggs here, that's oh in the coffee. No coffee, it's the devil's drink. But we do have shelves and shelves of unrefrigerated milk and what looks like jars of pink teeth is all I could say.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to be.
Yeah, yeah, they didn't get to that one. Maybe there's a cutscene, but but no. This guy playing the drug store owner is Don Packard. This is his only screen role outside of you know, showing up in the documentary. But man, he comes off as a legitimately creepy and intense character in a way that really makes me think this guy missed his calling as a B movie heavy because he has this kind of like carved from granite face.
He looks like he should be like just an old cowboy sitting in the back of a gunsmoke episode.
Yeah, he could have been a Michael Ironside of his generation, but not quite.
Oh it's said he's his generation's Don Packard. But you know, it's a memorable performance. A lot of the other actors in the film were, of course, just straight up locals, and many of them didn't work beyond this picture. But there is an interesting bit of one interesting person from the crew, Laura Gimser, an actor who starred in numerous Immanuel movies, which were erotic pictures of the day. Sometimes she was credited as Emmanuel, or she'd be playing the
Emmanuel character. She was the costume designer on troll Too, and reportedly she was the only crew member who spoke both Italian and English well enough to communicate with the actors, So she was the communicative bridge between the filmmakers and the crew and the cast.
She was the human babblefish that made this artistic production possible. Yes, well, that makes sense because a lot of the dialogue in this movie feels like when you take a sentence and you run it through Google Translate several times to different languages.
Yeah. Yeah, apparently. Fragaso was very It was very firm on the idea that the script should be used verbatim. So there was gonna be no ad libbing, no taking the dialogue and putting it in a form that would come out naturally through your mouth. No, it needed to stay in the original form. And therefore you have these just strangely structured sentences and sometimes just strangely expressed thoughts.
Well, maybe we should run through the plot a little bit, just to say what happens in the film point by point. Okay, so the So the movie starts with an apparent fairy tale scene. You've got a guy who looks like Jack in the beanstalk. He's got on the elf hat, and he's wandering through the forest and he comes across a girl who offers him some green goo. I guess it looks like toothpaste, kind of like aim brand or whatever it is that has that really verdant green.
It's so green that it looks like virtually nothing you would consume. It's like too green to be bad. Absinthe, toothpaste or candy.
Yes, yes, she offers this to him. And then we realized that this is a story being told to a child by an old man, and the old man is Grandpa Seth, and the child is Joshua, the main kid in the movie. And as Grandpa Seth narrates the story, I would love to see what book he was reading out of, because he talks about like when this girl kneels down to feed Jack the goo, he says that she was a lovely girl with huge eyes. The color of the sea, which brought to mind like Homeric scholarship
questions about like what color is the sea? What does the wine dark sea mean? I'm not sure what that was supposed to be there, But she has lots of freckles drawn onto her face with a sharpie. They just took a marker and dotted her cheeks. And then she feeds him the stuff and he starts bleeding green all over the place, and then the the goblins eat him, and then the end of Grandpa's story is just like, yes, they ate him. That's just what happened, and that's there's
no happiness or redemption at all. It's just a fairy tale where the guy gets eaten and that's it.
But it's pretty great because we've introduced the magic. We've introduced the monsters and introduced the rules for how they function. You know, they don't eat meat, they eat vegetables, but they use magic to turn people into vegetables so that they can eat them.
Right, I think that's all pretty well established early on. But I just have to say a couple of other things about this opening scene. So one thing we find out is that Grandpa Seth, who's telling the story, to Joshua he's a ghost, and he vanishes as soon as the mom appears in the room. And it becomes clear that Joshua has been repeatedly hallucinating his dead grandfather and he's not supposed to be hallucinating him anymore.
The parents are like, you've.
Got to stop, and she says to him, I think the line is, Grandpa Seth is in all our hearts, but you must banish him from your mind, like send him to the realm of dust and ghosts.
I love this because this is a case where someone could have made a firm case to Forgaso and said, look, you got two movies here, why don't you do the dead Grandpa ghost movie and maybe they can fight, you know, killer REDNECKX or something. But then you've got this supernatural troll thing that's another movie. But for Gaso's like, no, this is one movie. We're going to do both of these crazy elements in one film.
One of the things I love. I mean, the movie fails at verisimilitude at essentially every level, but I love Joshua's Bedroom because I noticed for the first time watching
it this time. Actually, I can't remember if I've said this already, but this is a movie I watched probably fifty times when I was in college and then didn't watch for about a decade, and so coming back to it was like one of those dreams where you wander through your childhood home, going from room to room and it's been a long time, but it's very familiar, but you also notice things anew. And one of the things I noticed this time was in Joshua's bedroom, he has
merch from essentially every baseball team. I'm not a real sports fan, but I thought usually you would have your team or your couple of teams, and they're the ones you're fans of, and you've got their kind of stuff. But Joshua apparently has like flags and merch for his seventeen top baseball teams.
This one kind of feels like a case where you have you have filmmakers who know what it's like to be a movie fan, maybe don't know what it's like to be, especially an American sports fan, and you just kind of roughly translate one into the other, you know, like if I were trying to figure out as a teenager, like what it's like to be a fan of sports, so it'd be like oh, I guess you do. Yeah, you just get a bunch of posters like and everywhere in my room that I have a music or a
movie poster. I would just replace that with some sort of sport poster.
Yeah, it's possible. I'm just wrong about this. Sports fans, let us know. I mean, do you have merch for your twentieth favorite baseball team?
I'd be curious.
But what we find out is the family is about to go on vacation for a month to this town called Nilbog to trade houses with some people from the town. They're going to come stay in their house, and they're just telling everybody the night before they leave that they're going to be gone for a month. So the dad appears to be on the phone with his boss or his workplace or something's like, yeah, we'll be gone for a month. Yeah, it's called Nilbog. Can you take care
of that for me. The daughter Holly is telling her boyfriend that night that she's about to be gone for a month, and it's like, one of the many ways in which there's very lack of verisimilitude in this movie is that the characters are as if they just started existing when the movie began, and there's no attempt to create a through line that they had lives before the camera started rolling.
I will say that the basic plot here, the whole switching houses for a month, than it almost makes more sense in twenty twenty than it could have possibly made sense in nineteen ninety. You know, like if you already had a coworker today and they're gonna be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to be switching houses with some friends for a month. Yeah, you know, so you know, just there'll be a different background on my zoom call. You'd be like,
all right, that makes sense. That makes us much sense as anything this year.
Right, right, Yeah, if you're a digital worker. I don't think George Hardy in this movie is supposed to be a digital worker. I mean, for all I know, he's supposed to be a dentist like the actor actually was. But yeah, So they travel to this country, and again the family is very much the family.
From Poltergeist Craig T. Nelson.
The kids are kind of fighting, They drive ten miles per hour on the freeway. That's pretty fun, and Joshua keeps hallucinating encounters with Grandpa Seth, who's warning them not to go to Nilbag because he says it's a kingdom of evil where the goblins rule.
One of the great things about Grandpa throughout this film is that he has and I have difficulty figuring out at times whether this was intentional. There's almost a Grandpa Simpson level of clumsiness to his ghostly presence, you know.
Yes, yes, very Yeah.
Well, there's one part where he's trying to appear in a mirror like Bloody Mary to contact Joshua, but he gets the wrong room in the house and he accidentally appears in Holly's mirror and she screams and freaks out. Like five minutes of the film are devoted to this mix up. They're really kind of padding it out there.
So I don't know if that's an inept choice or really a genius choice. I don't know. It works within the context control too, it absolutely works.
Yeah, So they get to the town. Also arriving at the town because I guess you've got to fill out the cast. This is a thing that often happens in horror movies. You'll notice that, you know, somewhere toward the middle of the first act, it starts getting populated with seemingly unimportant characters, and you're like, why are all these
people suddenly appearing in the movie. It's because, well, this is a horror film, and you just randos to get murdered as the film progresses, like you've got to fill out the kill list basically, And so that is mainly done in this movie by having Holly's boyfriend Elliott and his three weird friends show up in a camper van or an RV I guess, and they're just hanging out in the town too, and so you know what's going to happen to these buddies here.
Yeah, they're just pure fodder.
But in all of the scenes where the goblins attack the humans, they all pretty much have the same progression, which is the human is given something to eat or drink, and then they eat or drink it and that turns them into the green goop or turns them into a plant somehow, and then the goblins eat or otherwise attack them.
Yeah, so the main threat becomes this, and this is something that joshua Is is woken up to before the rest of the family. You will be tricked into eating something at some point that will transform your entire family into vegetables and then the trolls will eat them.
Right, and probably famously this is dealt with it a scene where the family arrives at the house where they're going to be staying for a month, and out on the table has laid a bountiful feast of disgusting looking plato food that looks like it was made out of like mud and sticks by a child, and sometimes with toothpaste and green paint. And they're like, delicious, look what they've prepared for us. And they all sit down to eat, and so Grandpa Seth says, Joshua has to find a
way to stop them from eating. And this is I would say this is one of the most famous scenes in the movie. He says, you know, since I am Chronos, the Wizard of Time, I'm just gonna stop time for thirty seconds to give you time to figure that out. But if Grandpa Seth has the power to stop time, you'd think that would be useful throughout the movie. Instead, he only does it once.
What I kind of love about this is that it makes the audience think it's kind of like a werewolf break right, where yes, the director is saying, all right, audience, how would you stop your family from eating the tainted food.
Right, what would you do?
And of course he does the most ridiculous thing possible, but in a way. But this is like, again the brilliance of this film, because only Fragaso would choose to have the child use this moment to jump up on the table and pee urinate on all of the food, thus tainting it further and preventing the family from eating it.
We're thankfully spared seeing that actually happen. There's a cutaway and then you see them scraping the food out and the father it's a tasteful movie, has quite tasteful, and the father is chewing Joshua out. He says like, you can't piss on hospitality. I won't allow it.
Oh yeah, and he shames them. He is he like he's messing with his belt after he takes him up, but he's like, what are you doing? He's like, I'm tightening my bel to notch because of the coming hunger paints.
So one thing about this is I was like, I know there has got to be a good monster science tie in, and I found one. Are you ready for some monster science?
Let's do it?
Okay, So surely there is evidence of some kind of animal joshua that pees on food in order to get people not to eat it. And you know what, I didn't find exactly that, but I found something pretty close. I found a paper from the Canadian Journal of Zoology by Fred H. Harrington called Urine marking at food and Caches and Captive Coyotes. So the study was done in
captive coyotes Canus latrans. And as always, it's worth noting that animals sometimes behave differently in captivity than they do under natural condition, so it's possible the behaviors described here wouldn't be as common in the wild. But either way, Harrington notes that often when captive coyotes are observed during feeding,
they will just sometimes urinate on food. They'll just pee on food piles or on quote, individual food items that had been carried and dropped some distance from the pile. And also sometimes when a food item was stolen from one coyote taken by another, sometimes the animal would pee on it. So why would you pee on food piles and food items?
You might be assuming something.
You might guess, well, okay, these are canines basically sort of dogs, so you might assume they are making a claim of possession. Right, this food is mine. Now I'm going to pee on it, so that you understand. But this does not appear to be the case, Harrington writes, quote marking of food did not reserve it for the marking animal. Others usually ignored the urine mark and ate the item, which is kind of gross but okay, So in that case, what purpose does it serve?
Well?
One observation was that this behavior of peeing on a food item specifically increased a lot during the breeding season, so it's possible it played some role in quote the expression of dominance in intrast sexual rivalries, So like, if there are rivalries between the males or between the females, they might be expressing dominance by peeing on their food.
That sounds kind of weird, like if you were doing some kind of office politics thing and you just like pede on your TV dinner in front of the person you're trying to impress. But you know, canines are different. But there's another kind of food peeing, and specifically, this was the peeing that occurred at food caches, so places where food was hidden or stored.
Quote.
Urin marking never occurred when food was cashed and rarely occurred while the cash still contained food. However, once the cash was emptied, urin marking usually occurred. Thus, at caches, urin marking evidently serves as a book keeping role, indicating that the caches are no longer worth investigating, although food odors might still linger, which I thought was really interesting. So, like you pee on a food storage site, apparently as a note to self and possibly as a note to others as well.
Nothing to eat here, move along.
Yeah, don't expend the energy of getting in here, because it's all the food has been to.
Right, And the same patterns of your in marking at cash is have been observed in wolves and red foxes as well, and it's been documented in previous studies that this actually increases foraging efficiency. The dogs and other canines waste less time foraging for food when they mark emptied caches. It prevents you from wasting time trying to dig up food places where food had.
Been buried before, but isn't there anymore.
So anyway, there's a kind of canine Joshua thing going on here, right, So if they had been coyotes, maybe he would have peed all over the table and then the family just would have been like, huh, I guess there's no food here, got to move on.
Yeah, And of course there was apparently no other food in the house, because this is what you do when you go to like an airbnb, right, you bring no food of your own, and you immediately start eating whatever food was in the refrigerator when you'd got there, or on the table in the case of this film.
But it's all just chunky milk that's in the fridge like everywhere in town.
You know. As long as we're talking monster science here, let's talk a bit about the monsters in this film, the goblins themselves. Okay, so these are clearly little people actors in a horrific mix of costumes. Some of the costumes are really almost kind of convincing, except maybe in the eyes. Others look a little more hastily thrown together.
But all in all, I find that they are like equal parts terrifying, like legitimately terrifying, because you're seeing people in strange like fur costumes running at you with spears, and then at the same time they're just completely goofy, like they're just completely like it looks like someone left an ewot costume out in the rain for a month.
Yes, I would say that the monster costumes in this film are cheap and bad, but they're actually scary because they're so cheap and bad. They don't code as monsters. They code as like people in deranged costume coming at you.
Exactly. Yeah, and I think it works. I don't know if it works in the same the way that the filmmakers intended, but there are plenty of scenes where they're like running down the hallways or you know, running through the woods. They're standing menacingly in the woods, and it works. Now again, the most notable thing about the monsters here is that they must transform their animal prey into vegetation in order to consume them, and of course they do
this via potions and magic. Now, to a certain extent, this makes perfect sense because in our food chain, there are plants that gain energy from the sun, and then animals that consume the converted energy in those plants, and then there are predators that consume those herbivores. So it's kind of an inverted treatment of how this works that
we see in the town of Nilbog, for example. Just one example to sort of put all this in context, consider what leaf cutter ants do they harvest leaf clippings, but they don't eat the leaf clippings. They use the leaf clipping to grow a specific ant, domesticated fungus that they use as their primary food source. It's not a magical transformation from one biological kingdom to another, but it is an energy transformation. So in a way, that's what
we're seeing happen here with the goblins. You know, they're like, oh, well, we don't eat the people. We turn the people into something we can eat. And that's a lot like what we see with the leaf cutter ants, just without the magic.
Yeah.
I mean, in a way, you're relying on the digestion and energy storage faculties of a different species to do some of your digesting externally for you when you're a leaf cutter ant like that, Like if you were to just eat the plant matter directly, you wouldn't be able to get as much energy out of it as you can get by growing some fungus.
Now, I can't remember. Do we find out how they're making the tainted food and the millbog milk, Like is that goblin milk from goblin teats or is that some sort of are they getting the goblin drippings from the people that have been turned into green mush.
This is the real nil bogology question, and I don't know the answer. I don't think they ever show that in the movie. I mean sense that it's all magic. And there's one thing that's cool about this movie that it has in common with Halloween three Season of the Witch. Yes, both movies rely on the magic of the Stone Hinge
magic Stone. So in Halloween three Season of the Witch, Dan O'Herlihy, the old man from RoboCop, steals one of the rocks, one of the bluestones from Stonehinge, and then turns that into magic microchips that turn your head into crickets. In this movie, Credence. Credence has part of Stone Hinge in her house and there's light and fog that comes.
Out of it.
It's never explained how she got this. Part of Stone Hinge was just there, and that seems to be the source of her power from what I can tell.
Yeah, I mean, maybe you use the stone. She traveled through the Stone through time, and there's an actual link between the world of the Outlander books and the world of troll too. I'm gonna I'm gonna have to explore that on my own time, I think, but I think there might be a connection.
Kilt Lifter four returned to Nilbog.
This movie, like we said, you know, it seems to
have a message. It had some sort of intent anyway, and going by what the film makers have to say about it, a certain amount of the deep thinking here seems to have revolved around the idea of vegetarianism as something that, if not in itself bad, is, is thrust upon us that it poses a danger or a threat to people because we find ourselves thrust into a story where the monsters are all vegetarians, and then the weird people in the weird town, you know, are all also
very much opposed to the consumption of dairy or meat and coffee for some reason.
Well, regarding the coffee, I think there is some pretty strong Latter Day Saint influence on this film, or at least presence within the film in the cast. But I would say, maybe you're selling short the critique of vegetarianism here. I think this presents vegetarianism as a satanic cult.
Yeah, yeah, because I mean there are scenes in the film where it's it's a little more vague as as to how we're supposed to take it, But there are plenty of scenes where Troll two is pushing vegetarianism as being this like violent transformation into plant matter, that there's this communal coltish pressure to drink nil bog milk to
you know, change become one of us. So you know that in these places the film certainly reeks of an entirely hyperbolic reaction to vegetarianism and veganism that I think most of us are somewhat familiar with. You know, the sort of fear that your uncle might spout about how the liberals are going to force everyone to become vegans and the government is going to take your stake night away from you, to take away that sort of thing.
They'll they'll take your hamburgers, they'll and and specifically, I would say that to the extent this movie has a message, it's trying to take away the implied moral authority of vegetarianism or veganism. It assumes that someone who just eats plants thinks that they're better than you and is show it, and the movie is showing you that no, actually they're the real murderers.
Yeah, it's like eating plants is murder. Let me show you how it works. It involves magic in months now, you know, I don't think we have time to really go into depth on this particular topic, but there are some very solid health and environmental arguments for at least cutting back on the consumption of meat and dairy without even getting into moral arguments. At the same time, one does have to realize that vegetarian and vegan food products
are not necessarily flawless choices. For example, just as far as milk substitutes go, you have to take into account the water usage and the crop location. As such, they are strong arguments for say, oat milk as being a better choice than say, almond milk, and a lot of that has to do with how much water is consumed. You also have to take into account like deforestation, habitat loss whenever you're talking about crops being grown. But this
is of course also the case with dairy cows. For cow milk, you have to take into account the land, juice, the water use, and methane emissions from the cows themselves. It takes roughly four square kilometers of land to produce just one glass of cow's milk, and that again that land use means potential deforestation and habitat loss. And on top of that, the cows are probably eating soy or oats as well, which puts an additional land strain on
their milk. Less land use is required meanwhile, to produce milk from the same soy and oats. For a plant based milk, each glass of dairy milk contributes half a kilogram of greenhouse gas emissions, and that's compared to point one two point two kilograms with plant based milks. Now, I was looking over all these stats and then I started thinking, well, what about nilbog milk. We have no idea how to crunch the numbers on how environmentally sound nilbog milk is.
There are scientists on both sides.
But anyway, back to the idea of this film basically being about hating on vegetarians or vegans, I decided to look into it just a little bit and I found a wonderful article on The Conversation from twenty eighteen by Kate Stewart and Matthew Cole titled Vegans Why they Inspire fear and loathing among meat eaters. And this is an informative read I recommend it to everybody. But here's just
some of the highlights. So first they point out that has been going on for a while, but that a lot of the old stereotypes about vegans are not applicable anymore because it's simply more or widespread. So all of these quote angry, militant, self denying, sentimental, fatty or joyless unquote stereotypes, they don't really zing like they used to. And I feel like you get a sense of that
when you watch older television. If you find like a nice vegan or vegetarian jab on saying an old episode of The Simpsons or even Futurama, you're like, oh, well, that that doesn't really feel as authentic today as maybe it arguably was. You know, twenty years ago, was.
The Simpsons jabbing at vegetarians. I remembered Lisa becoming one.
She did, But well, I guess I mainly there's a Futurama episode where there's an annoying vegan character that shows up, and he's the one I mostly think of because it is like just an outrageous stereotype of like an angry vegeta vegan who wants to you know who wants to convert everyone around him, and of course they have him eaten by a lion at the end, like there's some sort of perverse joy in seeing the vegan consumed by the animal.
Well, of course, I mean a vegan vegetarian can be annoyed, just like anybody can be annoying.
Well, yes, you know, yeah, everybody.
Should be eaten by lions. That's what I'm really saying. But I think it's a pretty common feature of human psychology that people who abstain from what's perceived as hedonic activity are often vilified and disdained by the people who engage in that same activity. And this is true for
not just meat. It's true for like everything that's perceived as like some kind of pleasurable consumption or activity, like drugs, alcohol, sex, unhealthy food, trashy TV, with any of that stuff, if you encounter somebody who says none for me, thanks, it can kind of trigger a discomfort and defensiveness in the people who are having some of whatever it is. Because like if you think of the scene at a party, you know, whether it's an episode of Mad Men, or
you know, kids at college or whatever. If somebody tries to refuse a drink that's not usually people don't usually react to that in just a neutral way, like if they had turned down a glass of water, you react like, oh, come on, have one, or you say like, oh, now the vibe is off.
You made it weird.
Like there's a discomfort people have when when others in their social circle are not engaging in all of the same hedonic activities that they are, And naturally, I think this comes from a place of insecurity, like the presence of a person who abstains from something is a natural social signal that makes you wonder if maybe you should be abstaining as well, And then it kind of makes you feel bad and makes you feel like, well, now I'm thinking about consuming this more than I wanted to
be thinking about it in this moment. And so the reaction is hostility and sometimes attempts at ostracism, like oh, you think you're just so perfect, don't you.
Yeah, And I guess a lot of this is unavoidable just by the you know, the fact that we are social animals and we pick up all these cues. And this paper backs up most of what you just said. Here, for instance, they point out quote the exchange is arguably emblematic of the contemporary plague of entitled anger that toxifies public discourse whenever entitlement is challenged. However politely so. Some of the other key points they make. They say, part
of this does seem to be unresolved. Guilt as vegan lifestyles may be seen as implying a failure to act on a moral issue. Again, Oh you think you're so great what you're turning down meat? You're saying I should turn it down too, That I should feel guilty about eating this meat, etc. On top of that, it can be interpreted as an affront to freedom of choice for some weird reason, even though they are actually engaging in choice. It's not a choice if everybody has to eat steak, right.
And then, on top of that quote, food practices are socially powerful markers of social and cultural identity, making actual or implied criticism of them personally and hurtfully felt. For instance, they give the example that meat often this is less most more social than cultural, I guess, but about how meat eating is often linked to masculine identity, and therefore it could be seen as a threat to one's masculinity or some other you know, way of some other like
cultural critique. They're turning down meat. Meat is important to me, therefore they are turning down me.
I mean, it's weird that I know exactly what you're saying here, and I agree that there can be this feeling that your freedom is being challenged even when somebody has not told you not to do something and not I mean, let alone that they don't have any power to prevent you from doing it, but haven't even told you not to do it or suggested you shouldn't do it.
And I think it's because sometimes when you do something without thinking about doing it, even being asked to think about the fact that you're doing it is perceived as a challenge to your freedom to do it. And I think I think that's where the abstinence of someone else comes in. Like, even if someone else abstains from whatever it is, meat or alcohol or whatever, even if they're not commenting on your behavior, the fact that you notice them abstaining makes you think about what you're doing when
you weren't thinking about it before. And it doesn't feel good to do that.
Yeah, it's like, oh, I'm meeting me, Okay, I guess I'm a monster. I guess I'm a literal monster that catches tourists and eats them with magic. And so you want to turn that on its head and you want to create a scenario in which the opposite is true. Yeah.
No, you're the monster. You're the one who's turning people into jello.
Yeah. So it's one of those things where with Troll two, it is on one hand, it's ridiculous, this seems like just a ridiculous, hyperbolic thrust of your artistic expression. But on the other hand, like this is clearly like this is a real cultural energy, Like this is a thing that people feel, even if they're not like truly rationalizing the thought. Maybe it's more subconscious in many cases, but
you know this, this is a true human reaction. So in a way, they've kind of pushed through that, and they've dared to make the film that that makes these accusations.
Yeah, and then we should say in the end, the way that they defeat the Witch and the Goblins is by eating a double decker baloney sandwich while putting a hand on the stonehinge magic stone.
Yeah, which which is within the context of the film perfect just a perfect narrative choice. But it also just again reeks of this whole, like, oh, eating steak is bad. Watch me eat some steak. Oh I'm going to eat steaks so hard.
It's like the sword and the Stone, but with instead of a sword, it's like, you know, a mulsified meat product.
Yeah, well, I mean it would be the ultimate you know, just straight up baloney.
Yes, it is funny that baloney is sort of used as the ultimate meat. It's it's not just any meat. It's like the mediest meat you could have. And I think maybe that's because it is the most processed form of meat, Like it is ground to a finer consistency than any other meat on Earth, and thus it's the most meaty. Like it's inherently identifying the consumption of meat with industrial processes for production of food.
Yeah, it is like the the the ultimate like anti druidic food product. It's like the perfect thing to overturn stonehenge.
Wey to hell with nature. Food should not look like the shape it originally in habits. But so, there's one last thing I wanted to talk about before we wrap up our discussion of Troll two, which is the idea of verisimilitude in film. This has come up a couple of times already. But one of the things everybody notices about troll Too, probably its most salient aesthetic feature, is
the overwhelming anti verisimilitude in the dialogue. Almost every time a character says a line, your brain just raises a flag that says, uh uh not how people talk. And so I'm trying to think of the best examples. One is when Joshua says to his dad while they're standing there being observed by a bunch of the creepy people.
In the town.
Joshua says, there are goblins, monstrous beings. There's, of course the line about Grandpa Seth is in all our hearts, but you must banish him from your mind. You know, the will be gone for a month. Can you take care of that business for me? And this made me think about a couple of things. I'm sure both of these questions will come up again and again in Weird House cinema, because anti vera similitude is one of the most common and interesting and enjoyable features in bad movies.
But first of all, why is it? Why is what we call vera similitude a desirable characteristic in fiction? To begin with, so vera similitude is, of course, you know, the feeling of realism, the feeling of life likeness in a book or in a movie. You know it seems true to life. Why is that desirable to begin with? And then the second thing is what actually causes the
feeling of verisimilitude in a film? As to why it's a desirable characteristic, I mean, there are a couple of answers, first of which is verisimilitude is a mental lubricant, right like it helps you stay immersed in the story and avoid unnecessary metacognition where you start remembering that you're sitting there watching a movie and thinking about it as a created piece of media. Anti verisimilitude automatically and immediately causes
that metacognition. Every time there's a line that thuds as unreal, like that you can't be in the story anymore because you're like, oh, wait a minute, I'm watching a movie.
One of the weird things about this, though I don't know if you've had this experience, is that, in a way, the experience of watching a film like this, like Troll two, is akin to watching a production of a William Shakespeare play. You know, because nobody in our immediate world speaks like a Shakespeare play. For that matter, you can point to other examples where this still holds up from contemporary authors, like nobody actually speaks like a David Mammott play. You know,
but but but we're drawn into it. But on the on the on the on the other hand, it can throw you out of it at times if you stop to realize, oh, nobody talks like this. I don't talk like this. People around me don't talk like this. I don't eavesdrop conversations of this nature.
Well, this actually cuts ahead to the other question I wanted to answer, what causes something to feel realistic? Because I agree with you, and I'd actually go farther than you just did. It's not just Shakespeare or David Mammott, I would say flatly. Almost no movies have what could actually be called realistic dialogue, if you're going to be technical about it, because almost no movie has dialogue that
sounds the way people really talk in life. And usually you wouldn't want a movie to sound that way because it would be boring, It would be really teed and hard to understand, and narratively inefficient. It would not move the plot along. And yet when we listen to characters in a movie talk to each other, there is a quality that we automatically look out for, and we intuitively
think of this quality as realism or vera similitude. But that's not exactly what it is, right, So what is that quality and what is that quality that when it's violated we feel like, oh, people.
Don't talk like this.
I don't know the full answer to that question, but I think part of it has to do with a kind of flowing narrative logic, where one idea or statement feels like it logically proceeds into the next one, even though that's not how people would actually have a conversation
in real life. Usually, a lot of the dialogue in the movies that causes this feeling of anti verisimilitude or feels very unreal has this quality of constantly stopping, or where the conversation is just ring and you are you are repeatedly feeling this thud of an inappropriate maneuver in the conversation.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, no, it makes sense. You know that. It also drives home I think why sometimes the most memorable moment in a movie is when another character is telling a story. Yeah, two examples come to mind from kind of related but ultimately very different films. One, of course is quint and Jaws, but the other is Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith is a scene where he tells a story to Anakin, And both of those are tremendous scenes.
Best scene in the prequels in my view.
Yeah, these are both like terrific scenes that have their own kind of inner reality. You know, you could you could take either one outside of the rest of the film and it would still make sense. It would still be entirely self contained, and it is entirely narrative and structured in a way that we just letely consume it.
Can I learn to have this power not from a vegetarian?
And of course Quinn is eaten by a shark, so it's perfect as well.
This is also something we could come back to in future Weird House episodes.
But I was thinking about.
The comparison between how verisimilitude is used in analyzing fiction versus verisimilitude in science, where the term has played an important role in the history of science and philosophy of science, and like trying to come up with ideas about what makes a scientific theory a good one. The basic problem is, you know, we generally presume that the dominant theories in the sciences tend over time to advance toward increasing truthiness
or verisimilitude. You know, they get a better and better description of life in the world as it really is. But and this was a point discussed by the philosopher of science Carl Popper, all scientific theories are, in the strictest understanding falls they're never perfect explanations of reality. The understanding is that their attempts to get closer and closer
to accurately explaining and predicting the world. But you could ask questions like what criteria would actually decide whether a theory is more truth like or has more verisimilitude than another? For example, does it matter how much a theory explains or does it matter more how accurately it explains what it does? You know, if a theory is like ninety percent accurate but explains a lot of things, is that better or worse than a theory that's ninety five percent accurate but explains a lot less.
Hm, that's a good point. I mean, I guess it to compare it to dialogue in a film, like as a viewer, you want that dialogue to tell you what's happening and what will happen. That's kind of what the dialogue's doing. Right, here's a dialogue scene. It's about establishing the threat of the goblins or whatever. But on the other hand, you don't want it to be so blatantly explanatory. You know, it's a careful balance you have to you have to strike.
Oh yeah, I mean that's actually one of the one of my favorite types of bad dialogue in movies is the kind that is just obviously to fill the audience in about something, and this is something the characters would never need to say to each other.
Oh. There's a tremendous scene of this to a certain extent intro too, where the woman is transforming into the plant who has been transformed by the witch's potion. The goblins are eating her, and then you have the kid down there who's staring up and he says they're eating her, and then they're going to eat me.
Yeah, oh, oh my god.
And there's a fly in his head the whole time. It's also so weird and authentically twenty twenty. But yeah, it's just it's like, of course you're going to be eating next, that's implied, but he says it too. And that's one of the wonderful things this film.
I imagine this must have been a really buggy set because people get covered in green goop, and I imagine that goop was very sweet and sticky whatever it was. Yeah, there must have been flies all over the place.
You know.
There's another great piece of dialogue like that in the very first scene where the mother sits down on Joshua's bed to explain to him that he must banish Grandpa Seth from his mind. She says, I think, she says, Grandpa Seth meant a lot to us. He meant a lot to you, to your sister, to your father, and to me his daughter.
Oh that's great.
Should we wrap up there?
I guess we should. Yeah, let's say. What else to point out here? I will say that I mentioned Night Killer, which also came out in nineteen ninety. It's a slazier film. Yeah, I gotta say sexualized Slasherville.
I tried to watch that one, and the scenes the good scene are really funny, even like on the troll two level, Like there's a scene of a dance choreography rehearsal at the beginning. That's just exquisite. But also that movie is gross. I would not recommend it at all.
So it's it's a deeper cut, not for everybody. It's not near as fun as Troll too. Troll two is for the children, and I mean, well, don't take me to the bank on that, but it's I feel like it's more.
Creative before you show it to your children. But yeah, certainly more than Night Killer.
Yeah, night Killer is not for most people, but it's out there as well. And you know that Fragatso has an entire filmography that's worth exploring as well. We mentioned Best Worst Movie as a documentary worth checking out about the making of Troll two and sort of the the culture of its acceptance by cult film fans. I also want to point out that there's an excellent episode of CBC's Ideas, which is a radio show podcast. They did an episode on cult films titled the Cult Movie Cannon,
and they discuss like what makes a cult film? Why do we keep coming back to them? And they mentioned several films, but there is a segment on Troll two that is notable.
Oh cool, You've sent me that to check out before, and I apologize that I never got around to it. Now I feel bad. Well, I have to go back and listen to that now.
Yeah. They talk about Repo Man, they talk about The Last Dragon. It's a fun, fun listen. They also interview some experts on bad movies and cult films.
Oh wait, there's one more I have to mention before we quit, because it's one that's not really worth watching in full because it's pretty boring on its own, but it's a good one to sort of put on and catch a snip of here and there. And it's called Robo War. This was not directed by Claudio for Grosso. I think it was written by him.
And they're directed by Bruno.
Oh okay, Yeah, And this one is a just blatant ripoff of Predator. Came out a year or two after Predator, and it has the guy who plays blast Hard Cheese in Space Mutiny Red Brown. Yes, he's playing the Arnold Schwarzenegger role, and the Predator in it is this cyborg. So if you watch the movie with the Google auto generated subtitles on it's on YouTube, and you get it
to come up with the subtitles. The robot is sort of mumbling in all of its scenes where it's stalking people, and it keeps saying what YouTube thinks is greasy target center And that phrase is in my head forever.
The target center. That should have been the title.
Okay, that's it from me.
All Right, we're gonna go ahead and close out this episode of Weird House Cinema. But in the meantime, we'd love to hear from everybody. Do you think this is a wise use of our time? Do you have problems with all of this? Let us know about that. But even more of the point, what other weird films should we consider for the future, not only bad films, you know, not only be movies, but just films that have some element of weirdness to them. What would you like to
hear us discuss on the show. Let us know. In the meantime, if you want to listen to episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, which again come out every Tuesday and Thursday, and maybe you want to listen to the occasional episode of Weird House Cinema on Fridays, well you can find Stuff to Blow your Mind wherever you get your podcast. That is the show. That is the feed. That is the podcast feed in which you find this show.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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