Filmirage/Kobal/ShutterstockSince its release 35 years ago, Troll 2 has probably awoken more food-based phobias than any other low-budget B-movie of its era. The Italian-produced, Utah-shot, so-bad-it’s-good hall of famer is less about goblins (not a single troll, and especially not the one from 1986’s Troll, appears in the film) and more about icky food dyed in sickly green colors. In the film, these gross foodstuffs are the poisoned creation of a witch and her flock of vegetarian goblins to trap innocent humans and turn them into plants, and only young Joshua Waits (Michael Stephenson) knows of its danger when his family arrives in the rural town Nilbog for a house-swap vacation. But take one look at the artificial, unappealing array of green food and you’ll be permanently dissuaded from thinking of them as tasty, tempting treats.Far from being scary, all the scenes featuring food — and the visceral, sticky transformations that follow — make you feel nauseous. When paired an ensemble of universally clueless and wooden performers, Troll 2 is as baffling as it is icky, channeling its anti-vegetarian satire into a simulation of adolescent-friendly American horror like Gremlins, The Gate, and The Monster Squad, revealing through its defects how those beloved films rely on carefully assembled charm and heart.By the time we got Gremlins and its coat tail-chasing spawn — Critters, Ghoulies, The Gate — Hollywood had moved away from scary movies about creepy kids like The Exorcist and The Omen. The childlike acceptance of fantasy and witchcraft had turned them into unlikely heroes against waves of little monsters, acting as neat, ideal surrogates to young audiences who secretly harbor fantasies of fighting off monsters without grown-up supervision.But for these films to work, even the less-polished productions, there has to be an emotional pull — you need to feel like the scrappy, exaggerated forms of childhood experience have crumbs of charm and relatability to encourage an audience along to somewhere mischievous and fantastical. Simply put, in Troll 2, everything meant to be normal is wrong. The non-professional actors are saddled with the dialogue of the Italian director Claudio Fragasso and his wife and co-writer Rossella Drudi, neither of whom speak great English, and Fragasso’s refusal to budge on the clunky syntax and word choice meant that Stephenson, along with actors George Hardy, Margo Prey (who play the parents Michael and Diana Waits) and Connie McFarland (who plays Joshua’s older sister Holly) are, cinematically speaking, hung out to dry.Their characters feel hollow and strained, like aliens trying to approximate human experience but can only express everyday domestic emotions and tensions with intense pressure and agitation. Forget the gooey, snarling goblin mayhem, the most memorable laughs from Troll 2 are from offhand dialogue misfires, like Diana complaining that her son’s imaginary friend is his dead grandfather, or Michael emphatically telling Joshua, after the boy spectacularly spoiled their dinner to prevent them from being poisoned, that “You can’t piss on hospitality!”The overall ickiness of Troll 2 is what makes it stand out. | Filmirage/Kobal/ShutterstockCredit to Troll 2, there are some obvious attempts at oddball jokes and intentionally strange comic-horror, but you’re always aware of the gap between the filmmaker’s intent and the result of their shoddy process. Garish close-ups and roving tracking shots effectively evoke the freewheeling delirium of Italian horror, but Troll 2’s mimicry of cheeky, teen-led American creature features is devoid of anything genuine or charismatic enough to compete with the most low-rent Gremlins knock-offs. Joe Dante’s anti-Christmas hit is a classic because it never considered any of the choices made by Fragasso and Drudi: Billy Peltzer wasn’t in a high state of anxiety for the entire runtime like Joshua is here, and he also wasn’t visited by the magical ghost of his grandfather. None of the actors spoke with the heavy, forced, shouted cadence of a creepy dream; absolutely nobody had a corncob-slash-popcorn sex scene.But like all movies entered into the American “so-bad-it’s-good” canon, the incompetence of Troll 2’s production has resulted in striking and effective choices, distinguishing it from the majority of bad horror copycats that are tedious to sit through. The complete wrongness of Troll 2 makes it a baffling but compelling counterpoint to more assured, successful films in its genre. Joe Dante’s Gremlins has a safe spot in the horror-comedy canon, but it’s a crowdpleaser because it deliberately neglects the more challenging and upsetting potential of its premise to please its audience, hinting at them in small doses to give the riotous film an edge, but not depending on off-putting, alienating material. Because Troll 2 is nothing but upsetting and unpleasant, it reveals just how curated these American audience-friendly titles were, afraid of anything that veered too far away from making the audience laugh or yelp.The goblins of Troll 2 (there are no trolls). | Filmirage/Kobal/ShutterstockTroll 2 underscores fears of isolation and unfamiliarity, siphoning out the possible pleasure of saving your family from strange little monsters with the help of your older sibling and their obnoxious friends. If the inadequate filmmaking makes us feel trapped in an alien world, then Troll 2 reveals how the classic mischievous creature features were primarily eager to please and needed to feel closely rooted in a collective experience, otherwise they would freak us out. It doesn’t work, but thanks to Troll 2, we now know what a wall-to-wall unpleasant Gremlins looks like.