Best Worst Movie Director on Troll 2, Sequel Plans, and Why the Original Isn't as Bad as You Heard

(L-R) Troll 2 stars Robert Ormsby, George Hardy and Michael Paul Stephenson join a few goblin devotees in Best Worst Movie.

One thing your film doesn't address is the economics of the resurgence. You sense some tension between the principals, and there are memorabilia shows and things, but who's making money off Troll 2's comeback?

MGM. They own Troll 2; they just picked it up from some other distributor, catalog after catalog. They also just happened to have Troll 1 as well, so they decided, "Let's package them together! They must be sequels." So that's how the DVD came to pass. People ask if I get residuals, but nobody does.

But Claudio Fragasso wants to make Troll 2: Part 2. Is that actually going to happen?

Yeah, believe it or not. I actually talked to Claudio a couple of days ago. When Claudio came to Los Angeles the first time and saw the line, he pulled me aside and he said [adopting heavy Italian accent], "Ay, a-Michael, look at zis! We musta make Troll 2: Part 2. The sequel! We must-a make it!" And his eyes lit up -- obviously because of the audience and the line. Talking to him, he's confirmed that he and [his wife and co-writer] Rossella have a script. So now he's just putting the financing together and looking for the right company, I suppose.

Will you be involved with it?

[Laughs] Oh, man. [Pauses] That's a really tough question. I'm split down the middle. If George was the star of it, and he had another chance to act, and I was in any shape or form able to work with him again, I don't think I could turn it down. I don't care if it's the second worst movie ever made. If Claudio were able to do this... I have a lot of respect for Claudio because of the heart and passion he puts into things. How many people probably told him that Troll 2 was the worst idea for a movie, and that he was silly to go to small-town Utah and work with actors who couldn't act to make his film about vegetarian goblins? But somehow he did it: Claudio got it made, and 20 years later it's still having an impact on people. It takes a lot of heart. [Pauses again] Man, I don't know. That is tough. One thing I can say definitively is that you cannot set out to make a film like Troll 2. But if someone said, "You have to make a sequel," then of course you go get Claudio, put him in the director's chair and say, "Have at it." Who knows what the result would be?

Well, let's be honest: Troll 2 isn't really the "worst" movie ever made.

Oh, absolutely no
t.

It's too entertaining, there's too much crazy stuff going on between the lines. Our resident Bad Movies We Love guru wrote a book about finding the worst movie ever, which ultimately wound up being just a maddeningly dull, poorly made, interminable film.

Oh, there are millions of others. You can say it's been voted the worst movie ever by IMDB, but I can't even really say it's a bad movie any more. "Bad" is relative. The worst thing you can do is fail to entertain, and how many movies out there will have you bored to tears? Troll 2 never does that.

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