On the Rod Blagojevich of movies.

H & I watched "Troll 2" the other night. (We'd heard of it but not rented until receiving some inspiration.) "Troll 2" is not the worst movie I have ever seen. It's not the best bad movie or the most bad-good movie I've ever seen. (One wonders whether all those acolytes have also seen "Final Sacrifice?") But it was good. Enjoyed.

General spoiler alert, as if that really mattered.

The thing is that on a lot of counts it isn't bad at all. It was edited competently and (assuming that the weird decisions about where to put the camera and when to do close-ups were made by the director) filmed well enough, as well. It doesn't feature a terrifyingly perky, ambiguously-gendered corporate shill or a truck painted black, given teeth, and labelled "Megaweapon" [N.B.: Megaweapon is by FAR the best part of that movie] or sex scenes more upsetting than you'll find in Pasolini. It doesn't suddenly switch genres between, say, racing film, teen cool-crowd film, musical, murder mystery, and teen romance or even shift main characters between greedy questing truckers, in-feuding rock-and-rollers, and a boy and his E.T. knock-off. It wasn't ridiculously boring when it attempted to titillate or frighten. It doesn't abuse the authority of science. It has enough classic lines ("you don't piss on hospitality!") and utterly unexplained moments (the boys waking up in bed together shirtless??) to be enjoyable. But really what I liked was its undeniable auteurist provenance.

Let me explain my tastes and standards a little more clearly -- if only by way of further example.

I don't care about the silly goblin costumes. Better that than CGI that doesn't look like it's actually in the same space as the actors, or animation that flirts with the uncanny valley. Old high-tech special effects can be beautiful or poignant even when they look kind of amateur now. Sometimes they're even still extremely effective, or at least cool.

I don't care about the near-uniformly terrible acting. (Exception: the creepy general store owner who tells one of the boys that coffee is the devil's drink is pretty compelling. The actor says in "Best Worst Movie" that he doesn't remember any of the filming because he was in a bad, messed-up, drugged-out place at that point and had just been released from a mental hospital. "I wasn't acting.") Valentino wasn't a brilliant actor, but he lights up the screen; the children in "Good Morning" aren't necessarily even acting, yet they are the center of one of the more emotionally delicate movies I've seen. (Someday I'll do a post on Nicole Holofcener's inheritance from Ozu, maybe.) I'm not a connoisseur of acting anyway.

I do care about tonal issues and weird inconsistencies.

"Troll 2" moralizes to no end and little more purpose. (Cf.) That isn't necessarily a mark of an auteur at work (again cf. "Reefer Madness," which has rather the feel of a bad-movie-by-committee), but it can be. The scary creatures -- by the way, they're referred to throughout as "goblins," not "trolls." In other non sequitur news, "Troll 2" has nothing whatsoever to do with the earlier horror film "Troll" -- hector and lecture the humans constantly. (We'll come back to this.) They present their way of life as superior, and find the humans' behaviors tacky as well as immoral. They even all attend goblin church together every Sunday to nod solemnly at their goblin pastor's lectures.

It also provides just about no explanation of any of the relevant background. I mean, any. (Cf.) How and why did they decide to house-swap with a family in Nilbog (yes, Nilbog)? Why can't the sister's boyfriend ever leave his friends behind for more than one second? Why does the (dead) grandfather know so much about the goblins and why does he materialize just when and where he does? Why do the family want to eat and drink the nauseatingly bright green goblin-food? Why do some people turn immediately into green goop upon eating goblin food and others petrify over the course of days into still-human plants? What on Earth is the connection between the goblins and Stonehenge (!)? And most centrally of all: WHAT KIND OF A VEGETARIAN TURNS HUMAN BEINGS INTO PLANTS SO HE CAN EAT THEM?

In "BWM," the screenwriter tells us that at the time she wrote the film a lot of her friends had become preachy vegetarians, so she decided to write a horror movie in which the bad guys were vegetarians. Hectoring vegetarians, who brag about the "organic additives" in their chlorophyll goop, seduce a teenaged boy with corn on the cob, and can be warded off with a baloney sandwich. She and her husband -- the director -- and the actress who played the mother of the family are all still arguing that "Troll 2" is a good movie. Not bad-good. Normal-good. The screenwriter thinks it's sophisticated satire. The director thinks he captured the live speech of American teenagers masterfully. (This despite the fact that he barely spoke any English at the time -- he and his wife are Italian -- and the actual American teenagers who acted in the film kept begging to be allowed to change the lines.) He's appalled, upon attending latter-day screenings in America, to find that "they laughed at the funny parts. But they also laughed at the parts that were not supposed to be funny." The actress thinks it's a movie with important things to say about relationships and family. She compares it to "the old movies like they don't make anymore, with Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart." (Because "The African Queen" isn't a boring, six-ways-saccharine film remembered more for the difficult circumstances of its filming than for its merit.)

"Troll 2" really believes in itself, despite all the evidence against it. (Cf., or rather cf..) While you're watching, it puts on a pretty good show. Before you've seen it and afterwards, you have a headache just thinking about whatever convoluted message it's trying to put out. But it is trying, desperately, to put out a message. It thinks of itself as a plucky outsider come to fix the system, to teach us a little something about life, and love, and hope. Maybe it doesn't quote stilted classic poetry (ahem), but "Troll 2" is definitely the Rod Blagojevich of movies.