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Survival of the Dead opened this weekend, marking filmmaker George A. Romero’s sixth turn at the troft of the almost unstoppable undead (from a box office standpoint, they are unstoppable). From the original Night to Survival, a film that finds secondary characters from Diary and Land front-and-center, Romero has given film-goers a hell of a lot to chew on.

And if you take all six films as pieces of a larger puzzle, he’s also given us a recurring theme (zombies might bite, but people suck!) and a big arc for the whole series: zombies, like primates, can learn.

This was hinted at it his Dawn, and in Day became the driving narrative. He revisited it in Land, with a roving mob of zombies riled into a frenzied cooperation by a mean-ass Mike Tyson-looking zombie king, and featuring another instance of a zombie learning to use a tool. The tool in Day was a handgun (who needs to eat somebody’s face off when you can just pull a trigger?). The tool in Land was a meat clever wielded by a zombie fresh from the butcher’s shop. We also saw an evolution of Romero’s sly often visual humor (making one of Land’s main characters look like, but not actually be, a zombie, for instance). And  we got an evolution of gore too, with the third film, Day, in my opinion, reaching a gruesome high. Romero has yet to top the zombie make-up and general bloody disgustingness of that film. 

And Survival, his latest, makes another evolution very clear: each new film introduces ever more imaginative methods of killing them zombies. In fact, the amount of pure “no way” cleverness brought to the killing of his new undead is one of the best things about Survival. So here’s a look back at the last five films for what I believe are the ten best zombie kills Romero has ever created.

Beyond this point there be monsters. Seriously.

Warning: graphic content!

From Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s sly humor comes through loud and clear. With a head like you’d think the zombie would be smart enough to not climb on a crate beside a helicopter.

Also from Dawn. We’re in trouble when the zombies pretend to be mannequins until you rush by all like, “Look at me, I’m in such a big hurry.”

Also from Dawn. After the hero takes a lickin’ (or a chompin’) and keeps on tickin’, his buddies are left with no other choice. This is a zombie flick motif, and I don’t think anyone’s portrayed it better than this.

From Day of the Dead. Romero and make-up gore-u Tom Savini (along with Howard Berger) really turned the blood-n-guts to eleven this time out. The ol’ “entrails slip out when the zombie turns over” routine never gets tired!

From Land of the Dead, which Romero shot in some sort of eternal twilight. Sure, a shitload of zombies take bullets to the brain, but a few, like sizzle-chest here, buy the farm in slightly more inventive ways.

Also from Land. And a few buy the zombie farm in slightly more elaborate ways. Romero bought himself some snazzy effects with his big budget, and he wasn’t afraid to linger on some of them.

From Diary of the Dead. Going all handheld with this one didn’t make Romero take a different approach to the gory stuff. Even though he’s an old codger, he’s not afraid to explore digital solutions for exterminatin’ zombies.

Also from Diary. Nor has he lost his black, black, black sense of humor.

Also from Diary. Did I say “humor?” I meant HUMOR!

Also from Diary. I’m not certain, but I think that this is the first case of the Popeye “oops” effect in one of Romero’s zombie flicks. For all you fans, it shows up again (thank to a hungry zombie and a fire extinguisher) in Survival, in theaters and VOD now.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that they’re made by artists. But I hear that more often than not these artists end each job by offing themselves. Good thing we’ve got art schools! You’d off yourself too if it was your hand moving the pixels but a “global brand strategist” standing over your shoulder.

Which results in this:

Boring.

And this:

Dull.

And this:

Somnolent.

And let’s not forget this:

Wake me when it's over.

These four blahtastic posters make up the first outdoor campaign for the movie Jonah Hex, the highly anticipated summer blockbuster-in-waiting. Like most poster campaigns of the last decade or so, they’ve gone the character-specific route. This is so expected now that it’s become a cliché. Clichés aren’t always bad, of course. Tarantino went with the character-posters for Basterds, but his were more graphic, and rather than featuring the actual characters, they features his characters’ instruments of pain. He made it his own.

Not so with Hex. Look at the backgrounds. What is that, a repeated title graphic? Really? Just big blown-up text at a canted angle as a background element, the only background element? Nice.

If people want to see this movie (anymore) it’s because of Josh Brolin. The guy’s on fire. He can (or at least, could) do no wrong. It’s actually pretty refreshing to have the heat falling on a guy who kinda sorta deserves it. Instead of, say, that creature fourth from the left. The only one, of course, to get the medium shot. And Michael Fassbender is also hot right now, very hot, and he too deserves the heat. He almost single-handedly shouldered Fish Tank, a good small movie that nobody saw. And he should have been in Basterds more than he was. He gave Hunger its soul. Yet in this poster, for some reason, they made him look like Jude Law. No, like Jude Law after making out with Mike Tyson.

I wonder what, if any, affect this lame campaign will have on anticipation. Remember when the first trailer for Avatar landed? A collective “meh” heard round the world. Of course, that might well have been a clever ploy on Cameron’s part to tamp down expectation that had grown beyond Biblical proportions. By the time the second trailer rolled out of the gate, most people would have been happy with old Abyss footage re-cut to a new song. Instead, we got a great trailer. And a lesson: its story, not spectacle, that counts. Of course, the film itself proved exactly the opposite point.

Fans issued a similar “meh” to the Hex trailer when it hit. So, does Jimmy Hayward, computer animator-turned-filmmaker, have any Cameronesque tricks up his sleeve? I kinda doubt it. The guy’s only previous experience in the chair which says “Director” was on Horton Hears a Who!

Far more than a quartet of lame-ass imagineless posters, it’s these three little words – Jimmy Hayward, Director – that brings the cowboy boot down on my hopes.

Image via Wikipedia

Out in the great salt lick, he read for everything and got nothing. The makers of Full House spent a whole day shoving him into every one of the main roles like so much Playdo. None stuck, thank God.

Imagining David Duchovny doing anything in Full House is as painful as picturing Bob Saget playing Hank Moody in Californication. The truth here, the deeply buried lead, is that Duchovny has always been funny, just not in an obvious way. Even Fox Mulder had his moments; his sly wit was often the only hint of sunshine in an otherwise somber affair. The key to Duchovny’s funny bone is his melancholy. It’s the foundation that Hank Moody was built from. When I point out that he seems to carry sadness around with him like a soldier’s pack, Duchovny laughs first, and nods second. “And there wasn’t room for that in Full House,” he agrees, finishing his milky coffee. Unlike Special Agent Dale Cooper on Twin Peaks, he does not take his cup as ‘black as the sky on a moonless night.’ “It was probably lucky for me that I didn’t get the television shows I auditioned for. I could never book a guest-starring role on a television show, except for Twin Peaks. People would say, ‘Oh you’re a film actor,’ and I’d say, ‘But I don’t have any money.’ That was always my reply. Thank you for the compliment, but loan me fifty.”

Duchovny didn’t remain destitute for long. Though it wasn’t for a lack of trying. In a moment of loyalty that’s either sweet or insane, he decided to turn down the X-Files offer. “I had another job,” he says. “A two-day role or something, and I had promised the director that I would do this role. It conflicted with The X-Files. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna be a stand-up guy, and I told my agents that I’m not gonna do The X-Files. I said, ‘There’s a lot of other shows like that that’ll come along.’ [X-Files Casting Director] Randy Stone said to me, ‘I’ve only said this to one other actor: if you take this job you’ll never have to work again. I said that to Woody Harrelson, Cheers.’ It’s not why I did it,” Duchovny says, grinning, or smirking, or both. “But I was convinced.” He still thinks of the show as the best thing that ever happened to his career, but not because of the money. What he didn’t realize at the time was how much he needed to work, to act, every day, in order to improve. “By the third or fourth year,” he says, “I really started to understand what I do and what I can do. It took me a long, long time. Not until Californication did I really feel like I was able to access what I always thought I could. I’m a slow learner.”

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

The X-Files yanked back the curtain on Duchovny, putting his face in every television in town, exactly where he’d never imaged it would be, and keeping it there for most of the nineties. Even his very public contract dispute, which reduced his involvement with the show’s last two seasons, only lead to greater fame. Though his issues over money didn’t keep him out of I Want to Believe, the second X-Files feature film. Despite its disappointment at the box office (it earned less than a quarter of what the first film earned ten years earlier), there are still talks of sending Muller and Scully one more time to the silver screen. Duchovny has said he’s interested. Since finishing the show, Duchovny has worked steadily, if not aggressively, appearing in an episode of another cultural phenomenon (Sex and the City) and a handful of films that passed mostly under the radar, his hilarious turn as a seriously obsessive hand model in Zoolander being the exception.

Duchovny in Zoolander.

He also got back to doing what he’d always wanted to do: writing. In 2004 he made a film called House of D and no, the D doesn’t stand for “Duchovny,” though a hell of a lot of moviegoers stayed away, probably thinking it did. It stands for “detention,” specifically a women’s detention center that once stood in the heart of Greenwich Village. Now it’s a park, but before 1974, windows in its cells allowed the female inmates to talk freely with, or scream obscenities at, pedestrians walking down sixth avenue.

Check back next time for the final installment of David Duchovny’s pet tarantula.

The maestro of mahem.

When George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead comes out later this month, in theaters and simultaneously via On-Demand (a first for Romero), it will mark the horror master’s sixth return to the ripe troft of the undead.

That’s because zombies have been very good to him. He didn’t create the undead genre, but most people think he did. And the truth is he deserves most of the credit he gets. His first foray into flesh eaters and the people who shoot them was 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, a classic in any genre. Most people forget that ten years passed, an entire decade free of dead, before Romero made Dawn of the Dead, the second film in his series.

When you watch all of his Dead pictures in a row, something interesting stands out, even more so than the fabulous amounts of gore on display: his leads are almost always either strong women or black men. Night was shouldered entirely by Duane Jones. In Dawn, it was Gayleen Ross and Ken Foree who did most of the heavy lifting. Day featured a similar pairing, with Lori Cardille and Terry Alexander. In Land we had John Luguizamo and Asia Argento. Hubba hubba. Michelle Morgan did the duties in Diary. And now Athena Karkanis largely carries Survival, as a lesbian Latina who knows her way around an AK-47 (along with Diary’s soldier, Alan Van Sprang).

When I mentioned this to Romero, he said, “I’d just rather give the characters some color, you know?” We were speaking by phone. He was at home in Toronto, where he’s lived for five years after moving one of his productions there to save money. “I even do it with the zombies. They’re not just guys in Nikes and t-shirts. I try to give them a past. I have a wonderful wardrobe person [and] we have this shorthand about how can we create a little character. Even if we’re just gonna get a glimpse of these zombies, at least give them a past… just to humanize them a little more.” I looked back through all of Romero’s Dead films, every single one, and you know what? He’s right. He really does. Them zombies ain’t just walking stiffs.

So here’s a look at some of the best undead personalities from the series (click the link at the bottom of the image for captions, or view full-screen).

Christian Slater, a troubled teen in a trench coat, after murdering (or co-murdering) a few of the most popular kids in his class, rigs the high school, and himself, with explosives? After those losers went on the rampage at Columbine High, there was a hell of a lot of talk about The Matrix, but I don’t remember a single mention of Heathers.

But it was something else about Heathers that surprised me even more than the black humor and the suicide bombs. The glasses. Anyone who’s hung around Williamsburg or the Lower East Side, or thumbed through the latest issue of Nylon, will tell you that big dumb glasses on pretty girls is all the rage right now.

Big dumb glasses on pretty girls ®.

And for this fad too we can thank the 80s. It figures! The damned 80s. Of course I knew the 80s “were back.” I’ve known they’ve been on the way back for a couple years now. I just didn’t realize to what extent they were, officially, here. I grew up in those 80s and somehow (probably because my home was in the Midwest and trends, like people, mostly flew over), I missed this when the big glasses thing happened the first time around.

But thankfully we have historical records like Heathers to remind us of the rock solid foundations behind our silly modern trends.

Renée Estevez, so ahead of her time.

The big dumb glasses thing got me thinking. Only people who didn’t live through the 80s would embrace the decade’s return. We got it wrong in the 80s. We got it wrong with our outfits (parachute pants?). We got it wrong with our hair (mullets?). We got it wrong with our politicians (Regan and grampy Bush?). We got it wrong with our cars (bitchin’ Cameros?). About the only way in which we got it right was MTV, and before long we even screwed that up. Without the “M” it’s just, uh, TV. So it is.

But probably the biggest way in which we got it wrong in the 80s was this: all our actresses started getting plastic surgery. Before long, previously pretty actresses at the top of their games started rocking a close cousin of the big dumb glasses look: big dumb lips. Only the big dumb lips have proven to be a hell of a lot harder to take off.

Meg Ryan.

Malanie Griffith.

And suddenly we had a bunch of thin-lipped perfectly normal white girls trying to look ethnic, at whatever the cost, to their pocketbooks, their faces, their careers, their souls. We can’t all be Angelina Jolie, people.

Strawberries and cream again!?

Some of us have to be Kenneth Branagh.

When you start your own Shakespeare company in your 20s, you don't need full lips.

It seems like I’m not the only one who’s starting to realize this harsh genetic reality. Maybe, just maybe, our actresses have started to realize it too. Because the ladies who got the major work done, many of our 80s idols, aren’t doing much these days, and many of those who avoided the knife are working a lot. The camera does not love plastic, it turns out. Nor sutures. And fish lips are just freaky. It’s sad, really, because with a lot of the knife-work that’s been done there’s no going back. The face is forever altered, for the worse.

In the place of graceful aging we’ve had a freakshow, where the last remnants of real skin and muscle battle it out with injected or implanted petroleum products and botulism toxins. Gravity and time step in, and it gets ugly. Nobody fights gravity and wins, not even Astronaut Mike Dexter.

Mary-Louise Parker.

And while former screen queens like Meg Ryan and Melanie Griffith, and slipping screen queens like Nicole Kidman race the clock with timebomb tissue tick, tick, ticking away, their sexy, seemingly natural counterparts, led by the likes of Mary-Louise Parker, Holly Hunter, Sigourney Weaver, and Katherine Bigelow, have climbed on top of their shoulders to stand tall, staring into the camera with the faces, and bodies, that god, and their personal trainers, gave them.

Maybe it’s a new Hollywood Darwinism (is that an oxymoron?). The more genetically gifted girls have won to act another day.

I actually have a lot of sympathy for these actresses. It’s not simple vanity. It’s not just some celebrity-fueled god concept. I was in the room with a leading casting director, an extremely overweight gay man, when he told Marcia Gay Hardin, in 1996, that if she wanted to keep working, she need, “needed” mind you, to get a nose job. The actress had at that time been working steadily for almost a decade, turning in great performances in films like Miller’s Crossing, Crush, Sinatra, and The Daytrippers.

But obviously it wasn’t her acting that bothered the casting director. It was her look. Her face. Her identity. She had a distinct nose. He thought it should go. Hardin didn’t listen, thankfully, and she’s become one of the most respected actresses working today. But I would imagine that many actresses do listen. How could they not? One of the most influential casting directors in town, a man whose tastes directly influence what faces make it into our film, tells you, a young insecure actress, that you won’t get the work unless you shave this, pull that, plump the other? You’d have to have a pretty rock solid character in order to withstand that sort of advice.

We are talking about actresses, here.

Nose jobs in Hollywood are as ubiquitous as writers in coffee shops, but we need only look to Jennifer Grey, whose post-nose job face was so devoid of what we all had come to know as “Jennifer Grey” that even the actress herself said she regretted it.

Maybe I’m ridiculously “glass half full” right now, but I wonder if we’re not seeing a shift. After all, I’m not the only one who has looked upon Meg Ryan’s post-face and flinched. The damage is there for all of us, including our actresses, to witness. But with Botox as popular now as cocaine was in the 80s, could it be that fish lips, nose jobs, face lifts and the other more radical treatments (not that injecting a neural-blocking toxin found on raw meat into the forehead isn’t radical) were just an unfortunate fad?

Maybe it’s only a matter of time before this trend, just like big dumb glasses on pretty girls, goes the way of the dinosaur.

Or maybe we just have better surgeons now.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

When I ask him why he abandoned the PhD he’d worked for some years on, he laughs. “Have you ever pursued a PhD?” he says. “I think the most honest answer is that I always felt like an outright impostor. I was interested in writing, and I was trying to find some way that I could live where I could make a living. I thought if I was a professor, I’d have three months off a year where I could write.”

And this was at Yale. After getting a Masters of English at Princeton. In other words, this actor’s no dummy.

I’m sitting with Duchovny at the Lexington Candy Shop, a relic on New York’s Upper East Side. The actor moved to this neighborhood in late 2008 with his wife, Tea Leoni, and their two children, Miller and West. It was her decision. They’d been living in sunny Malibu since Duchovny had the whole X-Files production moved from Vancouver to L.A. near the end of its run. That too was Tea’s decision. “It’s a pattern,” he laughs. “She wanted to raise the kids here. She wanted whatever it is that New York has to offer.” Such ambivalence could be forgiven coming from a man who spent the first three decades of his life here, growing up in what many think of as the real New York, not the playground it’s become, its citizens lugging Whole Foods bags through Central Park in the dead of night without a care in the world. “Not that I don’t love New York,” he says. “But I’m of the opinion that parents raise their kids, not so much cities.”

When he walked away from academia in the mid 80’s, he holed up in a friend’s apartment in Alphabet City (then it really was Alphabet City; now it’s just more East Village). His only real chore at the time was to feed a pet tarantula. “It’s depressing when you buy the tin,” he says, “and you get a nice full chirp… and then it gets weaker and weaker as the month goes on, until there’s one cricket left in there… and he’s next. That was kind of the metaphor for the year. I felt like the last cricket.”

That’s because he spent a couple years auditioning for everything (including Full House; they read him for every single role and still, thankfully, said no) and getting nothing. Nada. Zip. Then he got a commercial, for Lowenbrau. And he blew it. “Here’s to good friends… tonight is kinda special.” If it was so special, you’d have bought better beer. “It was my first time in front of a camera,” Duchovny says. “And I choked. It was improvised. I was [supposed to be] at a bar with ‘an old buddy.’ I started throwing a pretzel up and catching it in my mouth and I was like, ‘Thank God I’ve got something to do.’ An action. After many of those, I remember the director going, ‘Okay, we got the pretzel.’”

Image via Wikipedia

Eventually he landed some decent parts, and his film appearances quickly stacked up. Kalifornia, Beethoven, Chaplin, The Rapture, where he played a guy named Randy, appropriately enough, since he and not-yet-Scientologist Mimi Rogers had themselves a load of naked fun, albeit in the service of investigating deep Religious hokum.

This was not the first time that Duchovny would appear sans couture on celluloid. That distinction goes to his very first starring role, landed back in the late 80’s, in Henry Jaglom’s New Year’s Day, a little movie (unlike all those Jaglom blockbusters) which set a precedent that’s still playing out each week whenever Professor Moody drops trow. Which is a lot. But one of his best trow-droppings was also his funniest, and it wasn’t Hank Moody’s trow hitting the floor, it was Duchovny’s. Sorta.

Duchovny’s wry humor occasionally shone through all the somberness of the X-Files, but the people behind The Larry Sanders Show were really the first to understand that David Duchovny was, deep down, very funny. Playing a lonely, possibly-gay version of himself, he became almost as notorious as Sharon Stone, whose famous crotch-flash inspired this scene:

Check back next week for part 2 of my interview with David Duchovny.

Martin Scorsese & Robert De Niro - 9 films.

As I read on, I kept waiting for Empire to drop the ball, to forget one of my faves. But they didn’t, not really. In the back of my mind was “What about the Coen Brothers?” They work with the same people all the time, notably Francis McDormand, Joel’s wife, and Steve Buscemi, Ethan’s life partner (just kidding), and they’re both represented here.

And while I do think that the Coens’ pairing with Buscemi (in 6 films so far) has resulted in fantastic material, I might have gone with the less obvious choice of Jon Polito, who as Johnny Caspar, was front-and-center in Miller’s Crossing and feels to me almost as integral to the Coens’ vision as McDormand.

And I think John Turturo might have been even more accurate. He was Jesus in The Big Lebowski, for Christ’s sake, the simpering screw on which Miller’s Crossing turned, essential to O’ Brother and mister Barton Fink himself. The Coens have yet to ask Buscemi to shoulder a whole movie by himself. Buscemi brings the quirk, but Turturo brings the soul.

via Empire Magazine online

Harry Brown (2010).

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this anymore.

Harry Brown’s London is overrun with drugs and murderers, and Harry’s had enough. After burying his beloved wife, Harry lives a mostly solitary, sad life in a drug-infested South London council estate precariously and constantly on the verge of tipping from dilapidated and depressing into full-fledged war zone. Harry’s flat overlooks a dimly lit passageway that cuts beneath an uncrossable road, the entrance routinely choked with blood thirsty hooligans left over from A Clockwork Orange’s casting call. But Orange, also set in London, was a cautionary tale of a future gone mad. It took its ultra violence and its in-out pretty seriously, even if it was satire. It had more on its mind than a blood bath, and was crafted by an artist. Harry Brown is an altogether different beast.

After Harry’s only mate, another geezer, dies at the hands of these passageway thugs, and the police more or less ignore the case (because they’re ineffectual or powerless or both), he buys himself a gun, the first step in any respectable revenge fantasy. But Harry’s not your average old age pensioner. He’s a former Marine, you see, stationed once-upon-a-time in Northern Ireland. He’s been trained by the Empire. So killing’s a lot like riding a bike (in fact, probably a lot less dangerous; what’s the risk of breaking a hip while popping a cap in some crackhead’s ass?).  Soon Harry’s going on an incarnadine rampages that wouldn’t have been out of place in Taxi Driver, a film whose bloody rebirth had a point.

But Daniel Barber, this film’s director, obviously thinks his dirty Harry has a point. He’s talked about our need to “ask ourselves how we got to this point (uh, the Production Designer bought a lot of junk cars, gasoline, baseball bats and temporary tattoos?) – the point where it’s easier for kids to make a living from crime and drugs than a nine-to-five job.” Which sounds nice and all, and would have been fine if he’d actually used his film to, you know, raise that question. Or anything even close to that question. Instead, he fills a formulaic premise with cookie-cutter baddies, simplistic goodies, paper-thin cops (Emily Mortimer is wasted) and a general air of ridiculous exaggeration. Besides Michael Caine, no one, and nothing, feels real or grounded in this film. Hyperbole Brown they could have called it.

The best thing about Harry is Harry. The film reaches for gravitas, thinks it has something important to say, but it’s Caine’s fed-up old-aged ass-whooper who gives the film whatever weight it can claim to have. Which isn’t much, to be honest, but that’s okay, because nobody’s going to mistake Harry Brown for A Clockwork Orange. Gran Torino’s more like it, but even that old geezer had a few issues up his sleeve. All of which makes Caine’s performance all the more miraculous. It might be reason enough to see the film.

As Harry himself points out, in a blood-soaked bar, as his city burns outside, “to them out there, this is just entertainment.”

Image via Wikipedia

As a fan of both zombies (see my back page Q&A with George A. Romero in the current issue of Nylon Magazine), and Jane Austen, I’ve been following (if not necessarily reading) the whole trend started by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

And while there’s of course a movie in the works – how could there not be a movie in the works for something called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? – there is not, at least not yet, a movie in the works for its print matter follow-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls.

But that didn’t stop the book’s publisher, the suddenly wealthy Quirk Classics, from making a trailer for the book. A trailer for the book. Not the film. Because there is no film. Not yet.

“Shooting a trailer for anything is always a challenge,” says the director of the trailer. “A movie trailer takes all the coolest shots from a film which usually shoots for several months and condenses them down to 2 action-packed minutes. Additionally, the trailer usually highlights the most expensive shots in the movie. We had a short film budget, but had to make it feel like the highlights from an epic feature, all while shooting at most 2 or 3 days.”

The Zombies book is now in its sixteenth printing and has been translated into seventeen languages. It’s made a drawing room full of cash. But today’s film-goers and readers aren’t dummies. Was this trailer a clever move, or a big waste of cash?

Best Worst Movie (2010)

Director Michael Stephenson, way back when, in "Troll 2."

The low-budget monster movie Troll 2 spent twenty years ascending the hallowed ranks of “worst movie” polls the world over until finally reaching bottom: it was officially the worst movie ever made.

But, as often happens, it’s the story behind the story that’s the more interesting tale.

Shot in small-town Utah with talent recruited locally, but written and directed by a team of Italians with little to no grasp of the English language (I think “action” and “cut” were about it), Troll 2 is a fantastic example of a movie so bad it’s actually good. Sorta.

“Bad good” is probably the appropriate term (cue Orwell grave rolling).

And yet, the film has developed an intensely loyal band of followers, including, among other luminaries, members of the New York comedy troop, Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB), who have hosted “Troll 2″ nights in their Chelsea space that featured cast members, twenty years on, and fans lined up around the block (some of whom traveled hundreds of miles to get there). The movie is a bizarre, bonafide cultural phenomenon, packing enthusiastic fans into midnight showings all across America. They wear Troll 2 makeup, don Troll 2 costumes and recite favorite Troll 2 lines, like, “You can’t piss on hospitality!” They know the movie is bad (unlike Troll 2’s humorless director), but it’s “perfectly bad.” There’s just something about it that makes it special.

It would be hard to say the same of Best Worst Movie, a documentary that chronicles the phenomenon. Made by Michael Stephenson, one of Troll 2’s lead actors, it’s a mixed bag of veg. The doc is at its best when it focuses on the phenomenon, checking in with the members of UCB and the other midnight events, be they in theaters, basements or wide open fields. Most of the original cast are on board, none more so than the affable, game (too game?) George Hardy. George is a dentist now, living alone in Alabama, and he’s pretty content with his life. He’s got a great staff of ladies who love him and wonderful patients; he’s a bright light in his community. There was a time when he’d considered pursuing his dreams of acting. If Troll 2 is any indication of his talent (“You can’t piss on hospitality!” aside), it’s a good thing he learned himself a trade, and a well-paying one at that. And George, as this doc shows, would be among the first to agree (though not without some sadness).

It’s on the road trip to these midnight screenings, when we get to see Troll 2 and its fans in action, that the doc unleashes its secret weapon: Claudio Fragasso, the man responsible for the phenomenon, the director of Troll 2. Along with his co-screenwriter, Rossella Drudi, they make a somber pair, serious as chest pain, pontificating about theme, message, and the weight of a film that everyone else is laughing at. Best Worst Movie is at its most electrifying when Claudio Fragasso is on screen, the only man not laughing. As his now grown-up actors answer questions in front of audiences both enormous and, sometimes, pathetic, Fragasso bites his thumb in the back, shakes his head, paces, scowls and even shouts out, “You don’t know nothing!”

Margo Prey, in 'Best Worst Movie'

But Best Worst Movie also has something else up its burlap sleeve, and its this B-story that almost sinks the film. Hardy, like Stephenson, is more than game to take this trip down memory lane. And Fragasso seems willing to play along, even if his scowl says otherwise. The last twenty years have not been unkind to any of them. But the same can’t be said for everyone involved, and Stephenson’s stop-off at the home of Margo Prey, who is caring for her old mother, would have been bad enough (she says she wants no part in any of this) without the excruciating Troll 2 reenactments the three of them stage in the dining room. That’s right. Reenactments. When they get outside and Hardy complains that Prey’s mama made no effort at all to hide how desperately she wanted them out of her house, I had to say, “I’m with you, lady.”

But those moments aren’t enough to doom Best Worst Movie. It’s embarrassing, but also fascinating and fun. And in the end, there’s something almost warm and fuzzy about the way the fans of the “worst movie ever made” love the movie. It’s not out of hatred, or dismissal, or schadenfreude. It’s nothing like that. They see the good in all the bad. It’s genuine, they feel, honest, sincere. And their perspective puts them more in line with the earnest team behind the Troll 2 lens than the regular folks who found themselves, once upon a time, for reasons even they can’t explain, in front of it.