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To: Tribune7

That’s a load of bullcrap. lol JK Rawling wrote the BOOKS before there were movies, and the names are coincidental. TROLL, the movie, sucked. Now, that there was a movie with “Harry Potter” in the story line is one thing, to say it was “the first harry potter” movie is completely disingenuous on your part. The Troll movie is NOT in any way related to the “Harry Potter” books, or movies by JK Rawling, thus it is not “the first Harry Potter movie”. Geez

As a matter of FACT, Troll was a RIP OFF of “Gremlins” if you want to get REALLY technical about which came first.

Here’s what was said about what you just said.... try actually doing a little RESEARCH before you make ambiguous statements, pass BAD information, or RUMORS. Geez.

2009 remake

Writer/director John Carl Buechler is presently filming a remake of Troll, with the lead character Harry Potter who uses magic to fight magical characters.[1]

From a Troll 2007 press release in regard to the Harry Potter magical boy character: “TROLL has not been prepared, approved, or licensed by any entity that created or produced the J.K. Rowling series of Harry Potter books or the Warner Bros. series of Harry Potter movies. Movies Plus is not affiliated with J.K. Rowling or Warner Bros., nor has this movie been endorsed or authorized by J.K. Rowling or Warner Bros... Harry Potter and his family were characters in the 1986 movie, Troll, which was independently created and distributed before J.K. Rowling’s first book.”

[See Harry Potter (disambiguation)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(film)

Here’s a critic site about TROLL:
http://www.moria.co.nz/horror/troll.htm
TROLL
Rating: 2½ stars

USA. 1986.
Director/Story/Troll Creatures Created By John Carl Buechler, Screenplay – Ed Naha, Producer – Albert Band, Photography – Romano Albani, Music – Richard Band, Optical Effects – Motion Opticals, Inc., Stop Motion Animation – Jim Aupperle, Makeup Effects – Mechanical and Makeup Imageries, Inc. (Supervisor – John Carl Buechler), Production Design – Giovanni Natalucci. Production Company – Empire/Altar Productions.
Cast:

Noah Hathaway (Harry Potter Jr), Jenny Beck (Wendy Ann Potter), June Lockhart (Eunice St. Clair), Michael Moriarty (Harry Potter Sr), Shelley Hack (Anne Potter), Phil Fondacaro (Malcolm Malory/Torok), Anne Lockhart (Young Eunice), Sonny Bono (Peter Dickinson), Gary Sandy (Barry Tabor), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Jeanette Cooper), William Daniels (Brad Hall)

Plot: Harry Potter and his wife and two children move into a new apartment in San Francisco. While playing in the basement, the daughter Wendy is abducted by the troll Torok who then transforms into her likeness. Disguised as Wendy, the troll runs through the building, transforming the various tenants and their apartments into trolls and woodland idylls. Wendy’s teenage brother Harry Jr meets Eunice, an aging witch who lives in the apartment above. Eunice gives Harry a magic spear to destroy the troll before it transforms the whole apartment building and allows the troll universe to permanently spill over into this one.

For a brief time through most of the 1980s, father and son producing team of Albert and Charles Band had great success with their Empire Productions studio. The Bands were some of the first filmmakers to exploit the newly arrived video market and began making films directly for video rather than theatrical distribution. Most of Empire’s films were rather on the cheap and terrible side – TerrorVision (1986), Creepozoids (1987), Sorority Babes at the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama (1987) – and were often dependant on a lot of cheap goo and slime effects. But there were often a number of low-budget gems among their output including the likes of Trancers/Futurecop (1985), the cult classic splatter film Re-Animator (1985), Eliminators (1986) and Zone Troopers (1986). Empire collapsed in the early 1990s, whereupon the Bands reformed as Full Moon Productions.

John Carl Buechler was responsible for the creature and goo effects on almost every Band production. In the early 1980s, Buechler formed MMI, a makeup effects company that is variously said to stand for Mechanical and Makeup Imageries or Magical Media Industries. Buechler began working with the Bands with The Dungeonmaster/Ragewar: The Challenges of Excalibrate (1984). The Dungeonmaster was an anthology where the Bands commissioned eight different directors to each make a segment of the film, among which they offered Buechler the opportunity to make his directorial debut on one of the segments. Buechler subsequently went on to direct Cellar Dweller (1988) and Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College (1991) for the Bands, as well as various other B films including Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), Watchers Reborn (1998), A Light in the Forest (2002), Deep Freeze (2003), Curse of the Forty-Niner (2003) and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2006). The script for Troll was written by Ed Naha, who also wrote Empire’s Dolls (1987) and other films like C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud (1989), Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), Omega Doom (1996) and produced/created the abysmal The Adventures of Sinbad (1996-8) tv series. In between writing a great many novelizations, Ed Naha was also a freelance writer on Starlog magazine and the founding editor of Fangoria.

Troll is an entertaining ripoff of Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), a film about mischievous creatures amok that was one of the big box-office hits of 1984. Indeed the Bands had earlier ripped Gremlins off as Ghoulies (1985), a very cheap copycat mischievous creatures film, which became one of their greatest successes and produced a number of sequels.

Largely Troll has been construed as being focused around cheap MMI creature effects – the fantasy scenario tying everything together is rather thinly sketched. But while the Ghoulies films are cheap and dreary, Troll is oddly one Empire film that has a peculiar appeal. It is frequently a film that takes itself so silly as to be rather enjoyable. There’s certainly a lot of frenetic silliness to Troll and Buchler’s attempts to direct comedy are rather flat, but the bizarre creature effects and eccentric casting make it an undeniably watchable film. There are times it verges on the completely surreal. There is a truly amazing sequence where the troll causes Sonny Bono to undergo a cheap airbladder transformation into a seed pod that then hatches and causes stop-motion animated foliage to crawl all around and cover his apartment, transforming it into a forest filled with trolls. There are various other such transformations throughout. In another scene Julia Louis-Dreyfus is transformed into a nymph and goes dancing through her forest/apartment with her modesty covered only in artfully placed leaves. Elsewhere June Lockhart has a mushroom that had a face and nods in agreement with everything she says, which she hides by covering it with a lampshade when visitors come. Michael Moriarty manages to steal a good portion of the film with his entertainingly silly performance and a dancing scene that has to really be seen to be believed.

Buechler and the Bands manage to rope in a truly amazing cast. This include Michael Moriarty, who at the time was appearing in various B movies, most notably for Larry Cohen, and a few years before becoming a regular on Law and Order (1990– ); former Charlie’s Angel Shelley Hack as the mother; June Lockhart, once the mom on tv’s Lost in Space (1965-8) as the witch (when Lockhart transforms into her younger self, she is played by her own daughter, actress Anne Lockhart); a horrendously mugging Sonny Bono, formerly of Sonny and Cher fame, as a swinger neighbour; and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a number of years before finding fame on tv’s cult Seinfeld (1990-8) in her first ever acting role as an actress neighbour. Solid professional performances are obtained from most of the cast, including Shelley Hack, Michael Moriarty and, best of all, from diminutive Phil Fondacaro who succeeds in investing the character of a dwarf English professor with some sympathy and sincerity.

There are all the usual cheap animation effects and tinny music score associated with Empire’s films. It is amusing in retrospect to note that the young hero Noah Hathaway and father Michael Moriarty both have the name of Harry Potter, although it is not known if J.K. Rowling ever saw Troll before she created her eponymous hero. The background of the apartment is also covered with posters for other Empire/Band films such as The Dungeonmaster and Parasite (1982).

The legendarily bad Troll 2 (1990) purports to be a sequel, although this is Italian-made and does not come from the Bands or any of the production personnel or cast of this film.

(Review copy provided courtesy of Ryan Kenner from Movies in the Attic).


47 posted on 04/04/2008 3:27:01 PM PDT by Rick.Donaldson (http://www.transasianaxis.com - Please visit for lastest on DPRK/Russia/China/et al.)
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To: Rick.Donaldson
That’s a load of bullcrap.

Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!! HOW could you think that???????

52 posted on 04/04/2008 3:39:37 PM PDT by Tribune7 (How is inflicting pain and death on an innocent, helpless human being for profit, moral?)
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