Troll 2

Somewhere in middle school I wanted to watch this movie, especially because of its PG-13 rating I knew my mom wouldn’t take up an issue with me renting it. I had seen the first “Troll” at Seth’s house during a typical sleepover with his whole family and for some odd reason I wanted to see the second installment. Back in those days I enjoyed keeping a little List of Movies To See with different fonts I developed for each title in the back of my journals as a sort of appendix. “Troll 2” was one of them. I remember part of a summer in Waterloo, IA Alexei and I were aimlessly hanging around the playground of our mother’s elementary school. Alexei was a bad-ass in his early teenage years. I was mucking about on the jungle-gym and he was smoking a cigarette, most likely a Marlboro Red, and we were talking. I rambled on about “Troll 2” by giving him a full synopsis of the first one and then transitioning my lecture to include my desire to watch the sequel sometime in the near future.

I did rent it from Pyramid Video just as I had envisioned on a hot and humid night that summer after I had gotten back to Illinois from Iowa. My mom and I were the only ones home at that time; my brothers were in different places. I watched the movie in my stuffy bedroom and actually got a little scared and I don’t know why. I think it was because I imagined myself in the role of the tragic protagonists as trolls turned them into green food. Afterward I went to bed feeling unsettled and had a difficult time sleeping as I stuck to the sheets in my bed, the night insects’ drone sounding up the night.