Best Worst Movie (Doc 2009)
Director: Michael Stephenson
In 1990, an Italian film crew came to a small town in Utah to create a horror film, working title Goblins. The result was eventually released as Troll 2, though it had nothing to do with Troll (1986).
T2 has become a cult classic, considered by many to be the worst film of all time, and it certainly is a contender. The director, Claudio Fragasso, is a kind of Italian Ed Wood, inept, untalented and clueless about his own shortcomings. But, he turns out to be a monumental schmuck as well, arrogant, tyrannical and convinced that he is a genius ignored by a callous world.
One of the actors in T2, Michael Stephenson, has produced this doc about the phenomenon of cult films, and its effects on the surviving actors and crew. He follows the cast and crew from event to event, and we watch as the fame has its effect. Whether he intended it or not, it says something about the whole idea of the so-bad-it’s-good movie, and the acolytes thereof.
The film does well in big cities with post-ironic hipster communities. Although there have always been devotees of the bad film, and I include myself, the thing has become institutionalized and commercialized, from the Rocky Horror parties, probably the genesis of the current organized cult thing, to Mystery Science Theater 3000, to young directors who consciously try to turn out turkeys like T2. They couldn’t carry Herschel Gordon Lewis’s megaphone.
And here I absolve and praise John Waters, whose films are bad with a nudge and a wink, and whose vision as a film-maker is unique and brilliant. And Ed Wood, whom I love.
Fragasso might be a jerk, but he is completely sincere. One of the actors in the film, Alabama dentist George Hardy, becomes caught up in his own “stardom” and begins to act like a diva. When the T2 booth and panel flops at a horror-geek convention, he storms out as though it was a personal insult. I expected him to do Norma Desmond’s speech from Sunset Boulevard.
The film is done competently, and Stephenson has affection for his fellow cast members. Fragasso is given the means to expose himself as a jerk, and he nails it. The most fascinating person to me is Margo Prey, who lives in a tiny house caring for her invalided mother. She refuses to take part in the tour, and shines with a kind of injured dignity. I fell in love.
More to think about here than the director intended.
B