Movies

There’s a moment in Abel Ferrara’s “King of New York” when Christopher Walken strolls through a gloomy, blue-lit hallway, hair slicked, cheekbones gleaming, eyes burning with the privilege of a man who’s read the end of the story and knows he’s the only one left standing. Walken gives a performance so electrically odd you half expect the camera to tilt, or for the rest of the movie to collapse into a pile of glittering dust. And at times it almost does, but not for the reasons Ferrara might have intended.

Sometimes a film comes along so inept, so guileless in its ambition and so transcendently incompetent, that it explodes all the boundaries of ordinary badness and backflips, grinning, into the rarefied territory of cult ecstasy. Troll 2 is that kind of movie: a raucous spectacle of misjudgment that plays like a séance held for the art of scriptwriting—boisterous, deluded, and more fun than most of what shuffles out of the Hollywood Dream Factory on a Friday night.