Troll 2 (1990) is an Italian fantasy horror film directed by Claudio Fragasso under the pseudonym Drake Floyd. Here is the thing you have to know before anything else: it is not a sequel to Troll (1986), it shares no story, characters or continuity with that film, and it does not contain a single troll. The monsters are goblins — vegetarian goblins, who turn people into plants so they can eat them. Fragasso and his wife Rossella Drudi made the film in Utah under the title Goblins; American distributors retitled it to ride the earlier film’s coattails, and one of the most misleading titles in movie history became the banner for one of its most beloved disasters. Young Joshua Waits (Michael Stephenson) is visited by the ghost of his grandfather Seth, who warns him that the little town of Nilbog — where the family is headed on a home-exchange vacation — is goblin country. He is right about everything. Nobody believes him about anything.
At a glance
| Release date | October 12, 1990 (US) |
| Director | Claudio Fragasso (credited as Drake Floyd) |
| Writers | Claudio Fragasso and Rossella Drudi |
| Starring | Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey, Connie McFarland, Robert Ormsby, Deborah Reed |
| Runtime | 95 minutes |
| Rating | PG-13 (US) |
| Budget | $100,000 (reported) |
| Country | Italy |
| Studio | Filmirage |
Plot summary
Michael Waits dreams of farm life, so he arranges a month-long home exchange in the tiny rural town of Nilbog. Before the family — Michael, his wife Diana, daughter Holly and young son Joshua — even leaves, Joshua is visited by the spirit of his dead grandfather, Seth. The warning is specific: Nilbog’s residents are goblins in human disguise, strict vegetarians who cannot eat meat, so they feed visitors enchanted food that transforms them into plant matter. Then they feast. Joshua spends the trip sabotaging every meal he can reach — up to and including urinating on the family dinner, a tactical maneuver that earns him his father’s immortal fury — while Holly’s boyfriend Elliot and his friends trail along behind in an RV, wandering one by one into goblin hands.
Watching over the town is Creedence Leonore Gielgud, the goblins’ druid queen, who draws her power from the Stonehenge Magic Stone and runs her operation out of a chapel stocked with potions. One of Elliot’s friends, Arnold, watches her dissolve a girl into green vegetable matter for the goblins’ table and delivers the most famous scream in bad-movie history before being turned into a tree himself. The townsfolk close in, the Waits family is cornered in the exchange house, and everything rides on Grandpa Seth — a ghost with a paper bag, a secret weapon, and ten minutes of solid form left in him.
Spoiler section: the ending
Seth’s secret weapon is a double-decker bologna sandwich. Joshua eats it, making his body poisonous to the goblins — meat is their Kryptonite — then lays his hands on the Stonehenge Magic Stone alongside his family and Elliot, concentrating their combined goodness into it. The surge destroys Creedence and her goblins, and the Waits family drives home victorious. It does not last. The goblin family who swapped houses with them has stocked the Waits refrigerator with poisoned food, and Joshua comes downstairs to find a group of goblins eating his mother, who has already been transformed. They offer him a bite. He screams. Roll credits on one of the bleakest punchlines ever attached to a family film.
Production and behind the scenes
The script began as an argument. Drudi wrote the story that became Goblins partly out of frustration with friends who had become vegetarians, and she and Fragasso have always insisted the film was a sincere, deliberately comic horror story about fanaticism — made, remarkably, almost without blood at producer Eduard Sarlui’s request so it could play as family fare. Italian exploitation veteran Joe D’Amato produced through Filmirage (working under his own pseudonym, David Hills), and Drudi put the budget at just $100,000 for three weeks of shooting. In the summer of 1989 the production landed in Morgan and Porterville, Utah, with a nearly all-Italian crew that spoke almost no English. Costume designer Laura Gemser — who built the goblins out of burlap, foam rubber and latex masks, only one of which had a moving mouth — was the only fluent English speaker on set.
The cast came from an open casting call in the surrounding towns. George Hardy was a practicing dentist who showed up for fun and walked away with the lead role of Michael; his audition line, delivered to a room of Italian casting agents who understood none of it, was “You can’t piss on hospitality!” Don Packard, who plays the town’s eerie store owner, was a patient at a nearby mental hospital, cast and filmed while on a day trip out. The script existed only in Fragasso and Drudi’s broken English, was handed to the cast scene by scene, and when actors offered to fix their lines, Fragasso demanded they be delivered verbatim. Carlo Maria Cordio’s synthesizer score — a handful of brief themes on repeat — completes a film in which every department was, in its own way, improvising. Fragasso later maintained the comedy was intentional; the cast’s accounts, and the movie itself, tell a more complicated story.
Release and reception
Troll 2 was released in the United States on October 12, 1990 by Epic Productions and sank almost immediately, carrying its borrowed sequel title and a reputation that curdled fast: it is routinely cited among the worst films ever made, and holds a 13% score on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, in full, “Oh my god.” Think Horror’s review of Troll 2 scored it 1 out of 5 skulls — “So Bad It’s Immortal” — arguing that it fails at being a horror movie and accidentally succeeds at something rarer: a communal experience, powered by total sincerity from everyone on screen. The afterlife has been kind in stranger ways. MGM bundled it with the original Troll on DVD in 2003, Scream Factory gave the pair a double-feature Blu-ray in 2015, and Vinegar Syndrome later restored it in 4K — the treatment usually reserved for films people respect.
As of October 2026, Troll 2 is streaming free on Tubi and Pluto TV in the US, and is available with subscription on Prime Video and Kanopy, or to rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon Video and Fandango at Home. Gather friends. Bring bologna.
Legacy and influence
The resurrection started in living rooms and late-night cable, where the film’s very brokenness — the dialogue, the corn, the freeze-frame grandpa — made it unkillable. In 2007 the Alamo Drafthouse’s Rolling Roadshow turned Morgan, Utah back into Nilbog for a fan event called the Nilbog Invasion, cast and filmmakers in attendance; Fragasso was given the key to the city. Screenings took on the participatory flavor of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with audiences quoting along, and Arnold’s horrified “They’re eating her! Then they’re going to eat me! Oh my God!” — fly crawling across his forehead and all — became one of the defining memes of the early internet video era.
The cult got its monument in 2009, when the film’s child star grew up and came back for it. Michael Stephenson’s documentary Best Worst Movie premiered at South by Southwest on March 14, 2009, following Hardy — by then a small-town Alabama dentist and utterly bewildered cult celebrity — and the rest of the cast as they confronted what they had made. The documentary is everything the film is not: acclaimed, award-winning, and sitting at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a three-star review from Roger Ebert. Between the two films lies the whole strange moral of the story — sincerity plus insanity equals immortality. The festivals have never really stopped: in June 2026, fans invaded Morgan, Utah again for a Troll 2 celebration complete with a bologna-eating contest, thirty-six years after a dentist, a ghost grandpa and a hundred thousand dollars made the best worst movie ever.
Trivia
- There are no trolls in Troll 2: not one, not ever. The monsters are vegetarian goblins, and the word “troll” never appears in the film — the title was a distributor’s marketing decision, bolted onto a film shot as Goblins.
- Nilbog is “goblin” spelled backwards. That is the entire twist of the town’s name, and the film is enormously proud of it.
- The director is hiding in plain sight: Claudio Fragasso directed under the pseudonym Drake Floyd (sometimes misspelled “Drago Floyd” in databases), while producer Joe D’Amato worked under the name David Hills.
- George Hardy really is a dentist: the man bellowing “You can’t piss on hospitality!” was — and still is — a practicing small-town dentist who answered a casting call for fun and got the lead. The line was his audition piece.
- The store owner was played by Don Packard, a mental hospital patient on a day trip from the facility; his unsettling recollections of the shoot are covered in Best Worst Movie. Truth is stranger than Nilbog.
- The corn scene is scored to Joe Cocker: when Creedence seduces Brent in the RV, “You Can Leave Your Hat On” plays while corn on the cob bursts into popcorn — a sequence no summary can prepare you for.
- The fly stayed in: during Arnold’s legendary close-up scream, a housefly strolls across Darren Ewing’s forehead. They kept the take. Of course they kept the take.
- Meat is the weapon: because the goblins are vegetarians, the climactic secret weapon is a double-decker bologna sandwich, deployed with the battle cry “Think about the cholesterol! Think about the toxins!”
Related links
- Troll 2 (1990) review — Think Horror’s full review (1 out of 5 skulls)
- Killer Klowns from Outer Space — another sincerely insane 1980s creature feature, where the monsters’ food-based trap is the whole movie too
- Horror Locations — famous filming sites; Morgan, Utah, the real town behind Nilbog, earns its place in any pilgrimage