Cure for insomnia

Ever see Troll? It came out in 1986, directed by John Buechler. Horror movie fans tend to say “Ewwww!” when you mention his name. I can’t say that I know anything about Mr. Buechler, but when I came across Troll while channel surfing the other night, it appeared as if he were the poor man’s Larry Cohen. It wasn’t just because Cohen’s favorite star, Michael Moriarty, was in it. The film had a loose, funky feel to it, the kind I remember from Cohen’s work.

    Horror movies generally lose me in five or ten minutes—I’m no big fan. But when I saw Moriarty with Shelley Hack (!), Sonny Bono (!!), June Lockhart (!!!) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (from the Seinfeld TV show), I had to stay tooned. The movie is about this troll who takes the form of people he’s killed, and he grows a garden out of Sonny Bono’s corpse in Sonny’s apartment. (No, I wasn’t drinking.) Plus there was a crazy little girl running around possessed by the troll. If they remade this today, some quack would have her pumped full of Ritalin—toot sweet!

    I was also fascinated by two of the lead characters, Harry Potter Sr. and Harry Potter Jr. They were up against fairies and ugly pixies and all sorts of weird shit. Is this where the Harry Potter author got her inspiration from? Wow…does Buechler know about this? I don’t know what happened toward the end of the movie, because I dozed off.