Directed by Andre Ovredal
Starring Otto Jespersen, Hans Morten Hansen, Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Morck and Glenn Erland Tosterud
Polarizing review time. Get ready. I'm sure everyone is just hyperventilating with anticipation.
Trollhunter is a movie that gets a ton of praise in the online horror and fantasy communities. Like, a real lot. More than any recent movie that I've reviewed since The Babadook, and that's saying something, since the vast wave of reviews that came in for THAT particular film were nothing short of flat-out verbal orgasm. Peruse the IMDB external reviews for this Norwegian found-footage flick and you're likely to read lots of stuff like "visionary," "hilarious," "triumphant," and, dare I say, "scrum-tralescent." It's won awards, and not just the horror movie awards that don't count. Real awards. The kind that they have actual TV shows for. Well, at least in Norway, where this movie was made.
And...I didn't like it. At all. Boring life and times of Jon Lickness break alert: I've been showing a friend as many classic horror movies as I can for the better part of two years now. By this point, we've exhausted pretty much all of the main eventers (Jason, Michael, Freddy - but we still have Leatherface to go) and were looking for a break, so we decided to hit Netflix to see what they had. I remembered that the guy who runs the Good Bad Flicks YouTube channel heartily recommended Trollhunter and it looked good based on his video exploring its production, so we decided to give it a shot. The short version? We both found the flick entertaining at points. But...no substance. And long stretches of boredom, unfortunately.
Yes, folks, this is a found-footage movie, made during the time when that particular trend was all the rage. It's also Norwegian. The last thing I ever expected to find in the archives of the great, grand horror genre was a Norse found-footage film, but rest assured, if you can think of a comedy sketch about a horror film, someone has made it for real. Directed by Andre Ovredal on a fairly decent budget for a movie of this nature, it's clearly a semi-satire of the genre and has comedic elements to go along with its story about a dude who keeps the monsters of Norway at bay with his arsenal of high-tech weapons. But most of it, for me anyway, falls flat.
The concept of the movie is undoubtedly pretty cool. It's the how and why of getting there where the movie falls short. Meet the main characters (unfortunately): a trio of college students doing a report on illegal bear poaching. There's Thomas (Glenn Erland Toseterud), Johanna (Johanna Morck), and cameraman Kalle (Thomas Alf Larsen). For everyone who bitches about the characters in The Blair Witch Project being dislikable asshats, check this movie out, it might give you a newfound appreciation for Heather Donahue's prolonged improvised bitchiness. Oh yeah, upcoming review spoiler alert. Thomas in particular was a character that I just could not stand, but I digress. The group is doing a documentary about illegal bear poaching in the Norse countryside, and this is what brings them to Hans (Otto Jespersen).
Expectedly, this dude wants nothing to do with the camera crew, and justifiably so. When one of them is Thomas...dude, I get it. Supposedly, Otto Jespersen, the guy who plays Hans, is actually a reasonably well-known Norse comedian, and I'll take Wikipedia's word for it, because he's undoubtedly the most entertaining thing about the movie and easily the most likable character. After a few close calls with the local government and a few bloody bear corpses are found, the film crew continues to follow Hans, where they find out that his actual job is to corral the army of gigantic trolls that live in the Norwegian countryside and occasionally kill the ones that wander outside of designated areas. Wut.
I will give it to the movie in a couple places. First, the special effects, considering the budget, are really impressive. The trolls look more fluid and lifelike than just about anything you'll see in a Michael Bay movie. Secondly, it handles some of the folktale aspects of trolls with a lot of cleverness. In particular, the whole "turning to stone" thing and how it's accomplished is done in a really effective way. But this is also where the movie loses its way, because for every cool little scene that we get involving Hans nuking the trolls, we get a bunch of boring exposition from scientists or doctors giving us every minute technical detail about the biology of trolls as animals or something that lessens the effect and derails the momentum that the movie had managed to achieve. Since these scenes also involve spending more time with Thomas and his band of merry men and women, it's like a Monkey's Paw wish of epic proportions.
That's the story of the movie for me. There are bits of it that I really liked, but for every one of those bits we get like 10 minutes of tedious explanation scenes. All of the exposition, background and biology lessons take up what seems like a third of the running time of this movie, and it ain't no short one - at 103 minutes, it's LONG for a found-footage movie. And since these characters are so one-dimensional and forgettable, I didn't give a shit about what happened to any of them. There's a long sequence where the group find their way into the lair of a group of trolls that might have negative tension for this reason. And the climax, involving a giant troll with some sub-name that I long ago forgot and refuse to look up on Google, is the drizzling shits.
It's kind of a shame, because, again, this concept is cool. I can't help but think that it would have been much better without the whole found-footage gimmick. Supposedly, this might actually come to pass, because a U.S. remake has been in the works for a while. I would be down for that, considering some of the possibilities. Picture, say, Robert Downey Jr. in the Hans role. I'd buy seven movie tickets, myself. It's also a project that fits the definition of what a remake SHOULD be about, because there's plenty of stuff to improve upon. Especially the characters. Folks, these characters (again, with the exception of Hans the troll slayer) are middling at best and semi-hateable at worst, and they bog the whole thing down. There's no tension because of them, and no sense of fear or dread in any of the troll encounters. Fix that error, and everything else falls into place. Book it, Vince.
With that, time to assign my annoying contrarian rating: * 1/2 out of ****. Sorry, every film critic on YouTube. I can't join in the fun and recommend this one.
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