"Trollhunter" (2010) - The Swedish Chef meets The Blair Witch

I am sorry to Ragnar for my title tagline - I have friends and acquaintances from Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, but I can not place a single person I know who was born in Norway. I only know one Swedish Chef and that is mostly by reputation - but that was good enough for the bit. Jokes are way better when you have to spend 70 words explaining them.

‘In Poland, we don't ask, we do. Why problem make when you no problem have you don't want to make?’ - Piotr, the Polsk bjørnejeger. That should have informed the student film crew when they took off investigating the eponymous Trollhunter. The line where one of them compares themselves to Michael Moore made me laugh. I saw them as more Geraldo Rivera.They were similarly charming and unfortunately got into more trouble than he did interviewing those skinheads.

This movie is fun. The dialogue is dry and funny. The acting is great. Even the cinematography is good for such a low budget, shaky cam,‘found-footage’ piece of work. The action is exciting. The special effects are pretty good. The intent is for it to be dark and frightening, but there are enough bright, colorful scenes to appreciate that contrast. It is ‘scary’, but more in the vein of “Where the Wild Things Are” (2009) than perhaps 20 minutes alone with your thoughts after watching “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1937). It earns the high praise of my pausing the show to refill my water glass and get pretzels.

I think there is only one scientific inaccuracy that I caught. One of the characters gets infected by rabies. I think the progression of the virus typically comes with 30~90 days of an asymptomatic incubation period. This dude was showing signs of infection within a couple of hours. I called bologna on that.

If I could make one edit, I would have trimmed a few minutes off riding in cars looking out the windows. It was not so bad that it took me out of the mood. I was grateful that James Nguyen hadn’t made this. It would have been 30 minutes longer and we would have watched the entire ferry ride in real time.

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