Retro Raunch Revisit

TROLLHUNTER (2010)
Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Mørck, Tomas Alf Larsen, Hans Morten Hansen, Robert Stoltenberg, Urmila Berg-Domaas
Directed by André Øvredal
Released October 29, 2010 (Happy 15th Anniversary)
Thomas, Johanna, and Kalle are 3 college film students in Norway making their way into vast mountainous hinterland to film a documentary about illegal bear poaching. While checking out a dead bear and strange-looking tracks, they interview hunters and Finn Haugen, the head of the Norwegian Wildlife Board. The students are pointed towards another hunter, Hans, who prowls around in his battered Land Rover that is mysteriously scratched up from large claw marks. Traveling by ferry along the fjord coastlines, and driving on rainy countryside roads, the 3 seek him out in hopes of an interview and upon finding him are automatically rebuffed, but set off on foot following him nonetheless. Having picked up his trail to a campsite, one night in a spooky forest, after seeing mysterious flashing lights and hearing roaring, Hans comes bolting out of the dense woods, right at them shouting "TROLL!!!", and Thomas is attacked & bitten by a large creature. Escaping in Han's truck, and patching up Thomas' wound with duct tape, the trio find their own vehicle completely wrecked, and Hans admits that he is not a bear hunter but infact hunts trolls (as the only single licensed person allowed to do so in Norway) as part of a secret government branch. Shocked and skeptical but excited, when the students again ask to film Hans' seemingly adventurous "work," (having already scrapped their original project idea and switched gears to make him their new subject) he again refuses but then relents, allowing them to tag along as observers. Agreeing to obey his instructions, they coat themselves in "troll stench," a disgusting excretion of slime meant to mask the smell of Christian blood(!) which trolls can sniff out at ease.

After ensuring the trio also don't believe in God or Jesus, Hans whips out a large, hood-mounted, flash strobe lamp that high-beams potent UV rays (ala sunlight) which turn trolls into stone (ala Medusa) or sometimes causes them to explode. The group venture back into the forest and are chased by a 3-headed troll known as a Tusseladd (or Tosserlad), which Hans kills and sledgehammers into rubble. Afterwards, he bitterly grumbles telling the trio he's sick of the hazardous job, and of risking his grizzled life for peanuts from his tightwad taskmasters; with Hans now wanting the students to expose the truth, in part to his own complex atonement for long-participating in bringing the trolls to near-extinction. Finn arrives with a team known as the TSS - Troll Security Service, to plant a dead bear carcass (scapebears(!) imported from Poland) and fake tracks, and warns the students to cease & desist with their filming, threatening to confiscate their tapes, but without doing so. Hans tells the students that Finn's job (as the bureaucrat) is to keep the existence of trolls hush-hush and come up with cover stories, while his sole task (as the civil servant) is to kill any trolls that stray from their boundaries toward the population (power lines are really electric fences to keep them penned in). It just so happens there has been an unusual spike in hostile troll activity with the dangerous creatures venturing out further from their normal native territories. Needing a blood sample for study, Hans wears a crude pots & pans homemade suit, and looking like a knight stepping into a Monty Python sketch (and would further have Tony Stark laughing heartily), sets a trap on a bridge by using some sheep, a goat, and bucket of blood as bait which lures a troll known as a Ringlefinch.

Physically smashed around, he successfully obtains the sample, and takes it to a TSS veterinarian (a softy who really cares about the plight of the trolls and speaks of their Vitamin D deficiency) and is told it'll take several days before the results come back. The group visit a farm with several uprooted trees scattered about, and apprehensively follow troll tracks into an abandoned mine leading into a deeper cave. When a pack of trolls (mountain kings known as Dovregubbens) suddenly return, the group hide out of sight to the sound of ungodly snoring and horrendous toxic farting. Trapped and scared stiff in the world's worst-ever wind chamber, a trembling Kalle confesses he is a Christian to which his scent is discovered. Found by the trolls, the group flee in panic from the lair but Kalle is killed. The duo become a trio again with Malica joining them to take over as camerawoman. Since she's a Muslim, Hans is perplexed as to how the trolls will react to this. Finn returns, this time to direct Hans north to "fix" the troll problem, and the group uncover evidence of a giant troll on the loose known as a Jotnar. As Thomas falls ill, the troll blood sample is revealed to contain rabies thus explaining their erratic and threatening behavior. Unlucky Thomas has been infected from being bitten earlier, and after several attempts in pursuit, Hans kills the massive Godzilla-sized Jotnar using a rocket-launched shell that turns the troll into stone. Once back on the highway, Finn and his agents show up again, this time intent on taking the students' footage.

But Thomas runs away with the camera and when he drops at the side of the road, a truck stops next to him just as the tape cuts out -- with the driver presumably the finder of his last roll of film. An ominous epilogue states the 3 students disappeared never to be heard from again. With a slight compatibility to DISTRICT 9, this mockumentary blends the found footage stylings of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and CLOVERFIELD, both of which at their most tiresome have their ingredients of being limited, anemic and pedestrian. Thankfully, that narrow bad rap is not the case here as people talk about trolls, search for trolls, and big pay off -- they find trolls. A lot of them. Further adding troll history and giving us various types, names and sizes that visually, instead of being seen through the poor quality of irritating shaky cam and awash in pitch dark with infrared, we get solid sequences in firm steady shots with sharpness. All while glimpsing great landscapes of Norwegian scenery that would do tourist promotion proud. And then there's the physical appearance of the trolls -- a striking creative look of top-notch CGI fx that is highly impressive, first-rate, and particularly shown very well in the night. Forget anything resembling small, runty, cute Disney-esque, mohawked rainbow goblins, or Middle-Earth faery tale fantasy: these nocturnal, mythical creatures here of Scandinavian folklore are colossal, big phallic-nosed, grotesquely malformed, wart-ridden, ferocious hairy beasts, ready to stamp the unfortunate living shit out of everything beneath them, and chow down on some livestock or humans when they get the munchies.

Aside from a little sluggishness, a few loose ends, and some bland acting, TROLLHUNTER is full of regional inside jokes thanks to various cast members being comedians whose dry humor banter was heavily improvised. The gruff, tired and unfazed Hans who becomes the focal point, and is paired with the students who are in over their heads, is a recipe for witty balance. But it's easy to see how this can be lost in droll translation, and while the emphasis is on the characters, the movie for many might be a mixed bag as it oddly makes the absurd tongue-in-cheek content & context seem far more dramatic and serious, for as the tone of credibility & realism is played straight, it is left for the viewer to find the amusement in the proceedings. A perfect example is the movie's meta ending of Norway's then-Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, speaking at a press conference about the country's power lines. When he admits to having "trolls," this was actually a real clip in which he was infact speaking about oil fields and energy production, but the snippet was cleverly dubbed & spliced into the finale to seem like an unexpected, plain slip-of-the-tongue remark now holding an explosive and scandalous revelation for public record. And the stunned look on Finn's face who instantly turns to Stoltenberg is priceless. TROLLHUNTER is imperfect but still one of the far better, smarter, and more inventive found footage entries in this horror subgenre that is all too easily, and continually knocked for restrictive trappings and stale output.