DRIVE IN SATURDAY

DRIVE IN SATURDAY

TROLL ME NOW

Edouard Dauphin

Ten years ago, Ed Naha, a puckishly perverse writer who grew up watching monster movies in New Jersey, published Horrors From Screen To Scream, a neatly compiled encyclopedia of horror, fantasy and supernatural films, that, along with Michael Weldon’s indispensable Psychotronic Encyclopedia Of Film, has come to be fingertip reading for lost souls like myself, afflicted with an insatiable hunger for the weird, the unearthly, and the downright awful.

Now it’s the mid:80s— I’m not certain of the exact year—and Ed Naha’s name turns up on a firsttime screenwriting credit for a movie called Troll. Needless to say, upon seeing the credit in a New York Times ad, The Dauph packed a jar of absinthe, strapped on a 8mm short-trigger Pelmann and Rosenthal Mark IV, and hurried out into the New York streets in search of a theater near me. Naha’s film was playing at the first cinema I came to and the marquee said it all: “Troll starring Sonny Bono.” Sonny Bono in a horror movie? Sonny Bono is a horror movie.

Settling down in the No Smoking section with a Havana cigar and a three-dollar box of Milk Duds, The Dauph watched the opening credits roll. Yep, Sonny Bono was in this thing. But so was Michael Moriarty—does he only act in horror flicks these days?—as was Shelley Hack, everyone’s favorite Charlie’s Angel, if you don’t count Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, Cheryl Ladd, and Tanya Roberts. Troll was starting to look like my kind of film.

Moriarty and Hack (sounds like the names of my agents) play a bemused couple who move into an apartment building somewhere in these United States, blissfully unaware that a troll named Torok has set up shop there as kind of a mythical Lawn Doctor. Starting with the couple’s daughter (Jenny Beck), Torok goes about turning each tenant into a wizened, hairy gnome so that soon the building is crawling with green Emmanuel Lewises (lovable “Webster—Ed.) whose apartments have been transformed into miniature botanical gardens. Sonny Bono, in the unlikely role of a ladies’ man, makes a particularly good victim. To become a troll, his height is not really diminished that much but his living room becomes so cluttered with vegetation that there is barely a square foot of space in which to stand. Must have reminded Sonny of Cher’s old clothes closet.

Meanwhile, Moriarty, in what has to be one of the most engagingly dumb performances in recent years, is totally oblivious to his building’s bizarre co-op plan. He spends his spare time writhing around his flat, playing air guitar to the deafening strains of—and this is an exquisite Naha touch—Blue Cheer’s 1968 heavy metal recording of “Summertime Blues.” Finally noticing that his daughter—who can change into a troll and back again at will—is behaving strangely, his only response is to ask Shelley Hack if she used to to do a lot of drugs before they were married. Nice try, Michael, but what did you used to listen to Blue Cheer on— chocolate cigarettes?

As you’ve probably guessed, Troll is a blend of the horrible and the comic—always a tricky thing to pull off—and the finished product had the hard-boiled audience on 42nd Street alternately shrieking and laughing. Credit director John Buechler, who has a background in special effects, with creating a whimsical shocker that can take its place right up there with the lowest of the grade-B movies, the kind that we enjoyed so much once we moved on from chocolate cigarettes. And credit Ed Naha for an ace screenplay. Those of us who knew him when have always insisted that he should be committed, and a print of Troll may just be the convincing evidence that will finally cause the authorities to put him in a padded little room with no sharp instruments. Except, hopefully, a pencil.