Troll 2 (1990)

A family vacationing in a small town discovers the entire town is inhabited by trolls, who plan to eat them.


Troll 2 is an absolute delight. It hits that golden spot of good bad. It maintains a top-level awfulness throughout its 91 minutes (punctuated with little pockets of madness) but not once becomes frustrating or boring. 


The badness (and therefore joy) of Troll 2 boils down to two concentrated factors: The acting and the costumes.   
There are plenty of other bad points to this film, but these two are consistent throughout. 
Just when you might feel your enjoyment or concentration waning you're greeted by an actor wearing a brown sack with a huge pillow stuffed up his front, and sporting the most unconvincing and hilarious goblin mask. At times the crapness of the goblins caught us off guard and it was nothing other than hysterical.
The acting is either monotone and deadpan, or completely over-the-top and pantomime. There is no middle ground. Also the delivery of some lines miss the mark by several miles. 
Deborah Reed should win an award for The Most Overacting Ever In A Film in her role as the goblin queen Creedence Leonore Gielgud. She seems to have eyebrows that move independently from her face.


The cast try their hardest considering (we found out afterwards) that a lot of them had no idea what was going on with the plot. Which makes sense when it takes a good half of the movie for the characters to work out what 'Nilbog' spells backwards. It's the kind of movie that takes certain things for granted that shouldn't be - that an entire family would happily chow down upon a feast of suspiciously luminous green food, for example. The strangeness of it all is hilarious, though, and it has some of the most quotable bad movie lines ever - "There're sandwiches for tonight in here! It'll go easier on you if you eat'em. It'll make our work easy. Otherwise, we'll be forced to kill you VIOLENTLY!"


Troll 2 has developed quite a cult following (as the documentary film Best Worst Movie shows) and has dedicated fans all over the world. Even though its awful its incredibly entertaining, and there is something about it that is genuine and endearing. Troll 2 is stupid and you laugh at it, but if you met it you'd want to give it a big hug.


C.M.

Paranormal Ascendancy (2008)

Housemates Michael and Kenny have experienced some strange events in middle the of the night and Kenny is now convinced that he has a ghost living in his room who becomes active at 3.00am every night. Expecting to see nothing but a few tricks, Michael visit's Kenny's room himself one night and is totally freaked out by the experience.
Soon the activity becomes increasingly worse and they find themselves being taunted by mysterious spirits.


Wow! This redefines awful in terms Uwe Boll or Ed Wood couldn't dream of.


It looks pretty obvious from the film title and DVD cover that someone's trying to cash in on the success of Paranormal Activity. There is however very little to compare the two. Paranormal Activity is a horror film using familiar universal fears (things that go bump in the night) to scare the audience. Paranormal Ascendancy is a HORRIFIC film using bad film making to scare the audience. It was very scary, just not as the makers intended.


It's hard to conceive how bad this movie is. Every aspect of it (with the possible exception of some of the music) was poorly made. The script, the acting, the plot, the camera work, the editing, the lighting, the sound. All of it was terrible. Utterly terrible.


NO SHOT is framed properly! Characters will be talking to each other and one will barely be in frame. Its as if someone went through the film and cropped each shot randomly. 
The entire film has been tinted in a dull grey/green. Its as if the director watched The Matrix and thought "Wow, that was a unique and atmospheric film. Colour tinting my film will surly create a similar effect and be a sure-fire way to success." All it succeeds in doing here however is make the film drab and unwatchable.


The sound levels go up and down more than... actually more than anything. The sound even cuts out at times. Dialogue is muffled and distorted. We seemed to miss entire scenes of dialogue because it was so hard to hear, eventually we would just give up and talk amongst ourselves. It sounded like they were hiding the microphones in weird places like bedding and car doors. There were a lot of loud bangs and rustling that had no connection to the movie, apart from the fact that someone got into bed and a car door was shut.
Just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, at one point the picture and audio just disappeared for over a second. Leaving us with a black screen to stare at! Thinking about it, that was probably the most convincing moment of the film.


The script is atrocious and the "action" is so wimpy it could open a burger restaurant chain. The acting seemed to consist of reading the lines off a card held just out of shot. 


It does, however, have a quarter-way decent soundtrack. There were small pockets of atmosphere that came purely from the music. How the hell they managed to get permission to use Stevie Wonder's Superstition for the closing credits, we will never know.


The thing about Paranormal Ascendancy is its a bad film in every way, and an utterly unenjoyable film. In the Teacake Society we try to find enjoyable elements in all the bad films we watch, but there is just nothing in this film to smile at. We can usually find something ridiculous or ambitious to share in and enjoy, but Paranormal Ascendancy doesn't go far enough either way. Its just dull poorly made cinema.


In summary: Don't!


D. C.

Granny (1999)

A group of college friends find themselves at the mercy of a murdering Granny in the middle of their prank-filled party night. They end up turning against each other as the carnage builds up...


Granny should be given some credit; it breaks the record for the least amount of time watched before we wanted every character to be killed. In the most gruesome and horrible way possible, preferably. Unfortunately the carnage as promised in the description doesn't happen until a good twenty minutes into the film (a third of the total length of the film ... A THIRD!) and the first part is spent building up the most idiotic and annoying bunch of characters you'll ever come across. We can only assume that the only reason these people hang out together is because no one else will.


The film begins with a new girl wanting to join the group (for some reason), but before she is allowed to join their sacred circle of awesomeness, she must go through some kind of initiation ritual (and no, it's not surviving twenty minutes of listening to the rest of them talk). To cut a very long story short, one by one the friends get picked off in hilariously awful ways (knitting needles through the eyes, anyone?) and instead of, oh, I don't know, RUNNING AWAY, the surviving crew decide to bleat around panicking and shouting at each other until they're all dead.

Sorry if we ruined that for you there. But the good news is, there's a nonsensical DOUBLE TWIST at the end. We won't tell you what it is. You can spend the first twenty minutes trying to guess instead of watching it.

The best part of this film is how much you wish to inflict it upon others. The characters will enrage you so much and so quickly that you can't help but cry out at the screen. But once its all over you'll want to watch the mounting anger fill the faces of your loved ones as you bring the horror of Granny upon them for the first time.


C. M.