2010 troll movieRating: 16/20
Plot: Some documentarians--a couple guys and a gal--investigate murmurings of some kind of monster in the woods. Hey, wait a minute!
Actually, the kids are trying to figure out what's killing bears, but they stumble upon a guy who claims to be the titular hunter of trolls hired by the government to keep these giant trolls in their place and the secret of their existence a secret. He reluctantly agrees to let them tag along, probably because the girl is kind of cute.
Hell yeah! Rampaging trolls? I'm all over that. This puts a new spin on both monster movies and the found footage genre. The special effects are very good in that the giant trolls manage to mesh with the settings, but I do with they would have done a little more. They're really kind of there to be seen and then later turned to stone or evaporated. One would think that this found footage stuff would get old, but this Blair Witch-but-with-special-effects works because it's got a sense of humor. It toys with Norwegian folklore and never quite takes itself seriously enough to be a straight horror movie. The acting works well enough to keep the "This is real!" claim at the beginning afloat even though there isn't a single person on earth who is going to watch this and think it's real.
Well, I take that back. I did have a student this week who genuinely thought the Paranormal Activity movies were real. Maybe I should show him this and see what he thinks.
I liked the title character played by Otto Jespersen, ruggedly and aloofly, and I may have given this movie a bonus point for how pretty Norway looked. This is a very cool movie with a nicely indeterminate ending, and I'd say it's a must-see if you're into trolls.
I'd be honoured to join the club, sign me up! Looking over past entries it seems you've covered a lot of ground, so I'll try and find a good one to propose soon. I just saw Project Nim and bawled all through it, but since it's shortlisted for an Oscar I'll try and find something a little more obscure. In fact, if it doesn't win an Oscar, I will burn down the Motion Picture Academy.
ReplyDeleteIf it wins, it will be the first Oscar movie in which a human breastfeeds a chimp (even if it is offscreen). Scientists were crazy in the seventies. I'm going to pair Project Nim with The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a book about a psychiatrist who tried to cure three men with Christ delusions by making them live together. Surprised they haven't turned that one into a sitcom yet, actually.
But I digress. We do in fact have nickels up here, but ours has the queen on one side and a nice big beaver on the other. And the glory of that puppet story is that it actually happened. I haven't even embellished it. Kind of a highwater mark in my experiences with oddity. Also, if you want to be in puppet fetish heaven, check out the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco some day. That's where all my pictures of automatons come from.
Dude! You've got March! Be thinking of the perfect selection. We don't mess around with the Oprah Movie Club, and remember, like 2 or 3 other people will probably be watching this movie!
ReplyDelete'The Three Christs of Ypsilanti' sounds really interesting.