Get my best side, will you?

Alternately too intense and too dull for kids, Troll is a Disneyesque fantasy/horror movie that fails to appeal to any age group. But it does feature quite a cast of “why does that person look familiar” faces, including Sonny Bono, June Lockhart (“Lost in Space”), Shelley Hack (television’s “Charlie’s Angels”), Noah Hathaway (who played Boxty, the kid from “Battlestar Gallactica”), Michael Moriarty (“Law and Order’s” Assistant DA Ben Stone), Gary Sandy (“WKRP”‘s Andy Travis) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“Seinfeld,” but you knew that).

The standout performance, however, is from young Jenny Beck, who was twelve at the time of release (and is, incidentally, one day younger than me). Beck was nominated for a Young Artist award for her exceptional performance in Troll, which is appropriate because it’s her tiny, practically unknown shoulders that are responsible for carrying this tiny film as far as it gets.

This is the setup: the Potters are moving into a new apartment. When Dad goes off to get some burgers, Mom goes off to the store and leaves young Harry Potter (yes, Harry) to watch over his younger sister Wendy. He doesn’t do a particularly good job of it, though, and Wendy wanders off to be kidnapped by a troll hiding in the laundry room of the apartment building. Through the use of a magic ring, the troll — who, thanks to one of the film’s many expository scenes, we learn is named Torok — puts on Wendy’s shape and uses the disguise to attack the other dwellers in the apartment.

Get my best side, will you?

These apartment dwellers are Peter (Bono), the swingin’ single guy; Barry, (Gary Sandy), an ex-marine; Jeanette (Julia Luis-Dreyfus), an actress; and Malcom (Phil Fondacaro), an English professor. Each of these the Troll attacks with his magic ring, which turns them into cocoons. These cocoons then split open, releasing more trolls which do nothing but sing and grimace while next door Malcom stumbles through a bastardized recital of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.

Fortunately for everyone, Eunice (June Lockhart), the old single woman upstairs, is not only a witch but Torok’s former lover hundreds of years back (“Before there were countries or Presidents,” she says) when Torok was a handsome fairy and not a troll. Eunice knows precisely what is going on, which is good, because we’re certainly not going to be able to figure it out for ourselves. Left to your own devices, you might just mistake Torok’s actions for an overly enthusiastic interest in terrariums. Instead, we learn that Torok is trying to recreate the fairy-land of his past inside the apartment building. When finished, Eunice says, “that universe will burst forth like a fourth dimension.” Yikes. Well, we can’t have that.

For all of the movie’s star power, it’s clear the director thinks the audience’s real interests lie with the trolls. There’s something commendable about trying to make sure the audience gets a good look as budget-minded films often dodge the responsibility. Nevertheless, I’m not entirely sure we need as good a look as we get; each pan over the transformed apartments results in several long camera shots of the offspring trolls, who merely dance in place. Otherwise, they never move. To a troll, they all seem rooted to the spot.

Get my best side, will you?

Absolutely everything about the film, from the characterization of the parents to the thematic content to the level of dialog, screams mid-eighties children’s movie despite the PG-13 rating. In fact, cut about five minutes of the more gruesome effects from the film and two scenes of Sonny Bono screaming “SHIT!!!” and you’d have a nice PG rating. A little more judicious cutting and you might even be able to pull off a ‘G’ and call it fantasy instead of horror. But that still wouldn’t make it a successful children’s movie.

Cutting the offensive stuff is easy; fixing the pacing would prove to be much more difficult. Any energy young Jenny Beck puts into the movie — and she does do her best — is prompty sucked out by poor directorial or editing choices. Any time a writer reaches for the Faerie Queene to liven things up you know you’re in trouble, and taking three minutes out of the middle to show Moriarty lip-syncing “Summertime Blues” certainly doesn’t help matters. It’s a real and unfortunate waste of these actors talents (yes, even Sonny Bono’s) to enlist them in this film and then not bother to tell anything resembling a story.

It is something of a trip seeing so many of these people together in the same place. And it is also Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s film debut, poor girl, but she plays the same self-absorbed hipster I’ve always seen her play. So there’s nothing captivating there, either. The movie is too dull for most adult humans and too scary for most of their young. So unless you have a special interest in these actors, it’s probably enough just to know that Elaine from Seinfeld once starred in a movie with Apollo’s annoying adopted kid.

A closing note: this movie came packaged with Troll 2 on the flip side. Troll 2 stars a bunch of people who apparently only starred in Troll 2. I watched five minutes of it, then decided I had done nothing to deserve such punishment and sent it on its way.

Get my best side, will you?