Last year, Andre Ovredal's The Troll Hunter screened a few times during the Alamo Drafthouse's Fantastic Fest, but-- sadly-- we missed each and every screening. Since then, word has spread that the film is a must-see, that it's darkly hilarious, wonderfully written and packed with cleverly produced special effects. In short, the hype was running high. Now that the film's available OnDemand, we were able to give the film a look for ourselves. So, would it turn out that the buzz surrounding The Troll Hunter was warranted...or would Ovredal's film be just another overly-hyped, skippable entry in the mockumentary genre? Find out below, my gentle Examiner readers...
The mockumentary genre has been around for decades, but it reached the height of its popularity after 1999's The Blair Witch Project. That film-- a straight-up horror movie about three obnoxious twenty-somethings with runny noses trapped in the woods-- was a massive hit when it arrived, and so it led to a whole series of faux-documentary-slash-horror films: The Last Exorcism, Paranormal Activity, Paranormal Activity 2, the still-unreleased The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Some of these were "pretty good", but most of them "kinda sucked".
But-- as any film geek worth his or her salt knows-- the mockumentary format isn't just for horror films: comedies thrive in this format, as well, and they've been doing the "let's pretend it's all real" thing even longer than the horror-mockumentarties have. Look no further than Spinal Tap, which did the fake-and-funny-documentary thing all the way back in the early 80's. Christopher Guest has built his entire career around this sub-genre in the years since, making films like Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and Waiting For Guffman. Like the horror-mockumentary, the comedy-mockumentaries have all experienced varying degrees of success.
"Funny" and "scary" are relative terms, of course-- for every person that found A Mighty Wind amusing, there are probably two who didn't, and for every person that had nightmares after seeing The Blair Witch Project, there are two that found in laughably un-scary. What we see far less frequently is a combination of the two sub-genres: something that's both funny and kind of scary
Andre Ovredal's The Troll Hunter takes a run at being a mockumentary that lands somewhere between "funny" and "scary", and while it doesn't land precisely in the middle-- it's much funnier than it is terrifying-- overall, it's wildly successful. One would probably be most comfortable calling The Troll Hunter a comedy, but if someone wanted to call it a horror film-- something in the vein of The Last Exorcism-- I wouldn't consider them fightin' words. Absurd and incorrect, sure, but not "fightin' words".
The Troll Hunter follows a trio (it's always a trio) of documentary filmmakers who are trying to find out what's really going on out in the forests and frozen planes of Norway. As the film begins, we're not entirely sure what it is that they're after (not unless you've seen the trailer, in which case you know damn well where the movie's headed), but soon enough it's revealed that the documentarians are chasing a very odd story: a massive cover-up carried out by the Norwegian government that's been keeping the existence of trolls hidden from the public for...well, forever. In order to insinuate themselves into the cover-up, the filmmakers track down an old man, Hans-- the titular Troll Hunter-- who they've heard might be the government's only line of defense against these trolls.
Hans is reluctant to let the filmmakers follow him around, but-- after no small amount of begging and bullying on their part-- he eventually confesses that he's grown tired of this line of work: it's stressful, and keeping up the lie has worn him down after many years of troll-hunting. The majority of the film deals with Hans and the camera crew hunting down a variety of trolls (one of the film's greatest joys involves seeing the various trolls that Ovredal created for the film), and there's also some ongoing tension between the crew and the government agents that act as Hans' contacts: obviously, they're not happy about a camera crew capturing all this troll-hunting on film, as it's supposed to be a big-ass secret. What will become of Hans? Will the filmmakers survive their time with him? Will the government agents stop them from filming their documentary? Some of these questions will be answered by the time the credits roll, but not all.
While I'm not sure what kind of budget Ovredal was working with here, one imagines that it's tiny compared to most Hollywood films. I'm guessing that the film cost something like $10m, but I also wouldn't be shocked to learn that The Troll Hunter was made for $1m: I was dumbfounded to learn that last month's Insidious-- another independent horror flick-- cost only $800k, and last year we saw Gareth Edwards turn $500,000 into the jaw-droppingly beautiful Monsters (more on that film in a moment). It seems that we're seeing these DIY, micro-budget horror flicks more and more lately, and the most shocking thing about them is how consistently good they are. Name the last big-budget horror film that a) came out of Hollywood and b) was any good. Go on, I dare you. Like Insidious and Monsters, The Troll Hunter proves that you don't need $50m to make a really great, thrilling, effects-packed film.
The Troll Hunter reminded me a lot of Edwards' Monsters-- both films feature a small group of characters trying to outwit unreasonably large creatures across a largely uninhabited landscape-- but besides some plot similarities, they couldn't be more dissimilar in execution: Monsters kept its creatures hidden for the majority of the film and thrived on the quiet moments, while The Troll Hunter shows you the trolls in all their glory and mines entertainment value from the belly laughs it provides the audience with along the way. I enjoyed both Monsters and Troll Hunter, and I can understand why a comparison between the two might seem apt, but for my money, The Troll Hunter is the more entertaining of the two films.
The special effects work here is truly astounding. Ovredal's trolls look realistic, and it's particularly fun to see how each new troll the film introduces behaves: some hide under bridges (that one was a highlight), some have three heads, some are building-sized while others are "only" the size of a city bus. There's a great sequence where Hans breaks down the various kinds of trolls-- most of which we get to see during the film-- and describes what differentiates them all from one another: what they eat, what they do for food, what they smell like, why they're attracted to the blood of Christians (a hilarious detail) and so on. I cannot overstate how much I appreciated the attention to detail here. It's obvious that Ovredal really thought this thing through. No one would ever believe that The Troll Hunter's a genuine documentary, but the history lessons and detail that Ovredal provides makes it a lot easier to go along with the joke.
Check out the trailer for The Troll Hunter over there on the left. If that looks like something you might enjoy, I can almost assure you that you will. The film's available OnDemand right now, which means that you don't even have to go anywhere to see it: just press the button on your remote and revel in the troll-based madness that Ovredal's cooked up for us. I thought the film looked surprisingly sharp and robust streaming through my cable box, but I can't wait to see what The Troll Hunter looks like on Blu-ray: it's going to look awesome, and I'll be happy to sit through it a second time.
My grade? A-
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