- Troll (2022): Roar Uthaug, Norwegian director of generally mediocre fantasies, a disaster movie, a comedy-ish cop show, and the bad remake Tomb Raider, has turned in his kaiju movie! And… it's much much better than I expected. It's fairly linear, dumb miners wake up a massive mountain Troll, literally the King of Edvar Grieg's song In the Hall of the Mountain King as the use of a couple versions of the music and Dovrefjell location indicate. Paleontologist Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is scooped up as a civilian expert, and she coincidentally has the most adorably insane father (Gard B. Eidsvold) who taught her about Trolls. The government is in total denial about the nature of the beast, and only considers military action, except for one wacky plan. Nerd heroes like Siggi the very cute military hacker (Karoline Viktoria Sletteng Garvang), and friendly soldier (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen) figure out the solution half-assed, lot of running around antics and people dying underfoot, world is saved.
The romance subplot I expected doesn't go anywhere, Roar really misses a lot of conventional story beats, and often leaves us staring at conference or mess hall tables. The father is great, he's like a Dwarf driven mad by knowledge, and eventually we find out just how mad he has reason to be. The Troll itself is sad and pining for the fjords, with again really good motivation and mythical backstory. Hoo-wa soldiers do their jobs despite obvious court-martial ignoring of orders.
Moral of the story: Don't be a Christian, because Trolls can smell Christian blood.
Fluff, but a pretty good kaiju movie.
★★★★☆
- Trollhunter (2010): By André Øvredal, who also made The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Halfway between Blair Witch and X-Files, student filmmakers follow around a creepy man (Otto Jespersen) in a van, who turns out to be a professional Troll hunter, learn horrible realities their government does not want them to know.
The Trolls, plural, here are managed wildlife, with fairly wide-scale knowledge and consequences in the Norwegian government. Much more thought has been put into how they live and function, and each one has its own style. No boring office work here, just dark woods with something much worse than bears.
Cheaply made, and really the kids are all kind of indistinguishable, but the writing, plot, and cinema verité style carry it.
Moral of the story: Don't be a Christian, because Trolls can smell Christian blood.
★★★★½
- Stand Still Stay Silent aka SSSS (webcomic): wiki Trolls here are not giant monsters, but a plague that infects any animal life. Very small animals keep some original form and maybe a monster personality, but can be eaten by cats, which are immune to the plague; larger animals like people just turn into horrible gribbly masses of tentacles and parts, Shoggoths basically. Scandinavian old-timey pagan religion is the only real weapon against the Trolls.
90 years after the apocalypse, a crew of immune soldiers, psychic pagan wizards, cat, and a straggler or two get in a van and go scouting the old city. It's just non-stop horrors, with occasional beauty of nature (but inherently violent, evil nature) reclaiming civilization. Just a charming comic. Zero punches are pulled.
The "second adventure" of the webcomic contradicts this with tainted bears that have personalities, the main characters lose their personalities, and then COVID happened, the author went insane and became a Christian with apocalyptic Mark of the Beast paranoia "oh no they're gonna ban MY BIBLE" (says Christians just before banning every book except their Bible), and stopped the comic with Christianity saving everyone even tho it was explicitly useless nonsense before.
Moral of the story: Don't be a Christian, because Christians are Trolls.
★★★★☆ for the first adventure, ☆☆☆☆☆ for the second.
BONUS:
- Trollies Radio Show Sing-A-Long (1992): This was on FORGOTTEN_VCR the other day, and it is nightmarish. Ripoff "troll" doll puppets sing bad covers of pop rock songs. The DJ Trollie [sic] isn't the worst thing ever, and the saxophone rock crab is great, amazing, but everything else is 30 minutes of child entertainment hell. Man has sinned against all the gods and this is our punishment.
Moral of the story: Don't have ears, because the Trollies will kill you with them.
★☆☆☆☆ yes is actually preferable to SSSS adventure 2.