The Troll Hunter

The Norwegian mockumentary, The Troll Hunter, may sound like a recycled import, but this creature feature that attempts to explain the unexplainable is fun.

With elements of Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, Cloverfield, and Paranormal Activity, it's a merry monster movie that explores the fantastical and embraces the bizarre in matter-of-fact fashion.

But the film it most resembles and recalls is The Blair Witch Project, with so much similarly shaky, handheld camera work, terrified investigators, and ostensibly found footage, we could easily think of it as The Bear Switch Project.

The title character, a bearded woodsman named Hans, played by deadpan Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen, agrees to allow a three-student film crew to accompany him on his rounds as he investigates a series of mysterious bear killings in the countryside. Camera and microphone at the ready, they follow him into the forest and into mountainside caves, expecting to expose him as a bear poacher, an unlicensed bear hunter, as part of a school project.

But what they soon learn is that it isn't bears that Hans is tracking but trolls, and that the humongous, hideous beasts, who can smell and sniff out Christian blood, might have three heads, might be rabid, and might under certain conditions explode or turn to stone.

Yep, it turns out that those gigantic creatures of Scandinavian lore -- predatory and simpleminded, with designs on sheep and tourists -- actually exist, and a sustained government coverup has managed to keep this secret from the public. Hans actually works for the surreptitious government agency, the TSS (Troll Security Service). The paperwork aspect of his job is, after he has hunted down and killed his prey, filling out a bureaucratic Slain Troll Form.

The Troll Hunter isn't exactly a terrifying horror flick and isn't exactly a satirical comedy. There is legitimate suspense and there are a number of generic scares. But writer-director Andre Avredal gives his fanciful fantasy a dry, idiosyncratic charm by mixing suspense, comedy, horror, and CGI-enhanced action and by being serious-minded but light-fingered about following through on the film's peculiar premise as it marries the scary and the silly.

The director is not coy about showing us the fabled trolls, which look like enormous Maurice Sendak creatures and have apparently been the source of many of Norway's problems over the years that have heretofore been attributed to such other factors as global warming.

At the risk of scaring away folks who might have a legitimate interest in this quirky film in its native form, there will be an American version, as director Chris Columbus has already acquired the remake rights. Whether it will offer the goofy charm of this B-movie original remains to be seen.

A derivative but delightful exercise in supernatural absurdity, The Troll Hunter is a refreshingly comedic action-adventure mock-doc that succeeds by taking its troll, but never too seriously.

 

90 minutes

In theaters July 1, 2011

Rating: PG-13, Mockumentary

 

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