The horror community is in mourning over the loss of director and special FX wizard John Carl Buechler, who passed away this week at the age of 66. Though he will be best be remembered for his countless contributions to creature and makeup effects – his gooey monsters, splattery kills, and his role as mentor and friend to so many in the industry – Buechler occasionally had the opportunity to direct. His films, while never entirely successful, always showcased something special and unique – they have an energy to them and an enthusiasm for filmmaking that’s infectious.
That pretty well describes Troll, Buechler’s feature-length directing debut from 1986. After designing and executing effects for a number of Empire Pictures productions for producer Charles Band, Buechler was given the chance to sit in the director’s chair for one segment (“Demons of the Dead”) in the 1985 anthology The Dungeonmaster. It was 1986’s Troll, however, that first found Buechler fully calling the shots on a project he had dreamed up years earlier*, though screenwriting duties would eventually fall to Ed Naha.
Originally conceived as a bloody, rated-R horror movie, Troll was softened into a more family-friendly PG-13 fantasy when the project moved over from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures to Empire Pictures, the company that would ultimately produce and release the film. With an impressive cast and a big marketing push, it’s one of Empire’s more ambitious efforts despite retaining some of the studio’s hallmarks – namely, the kinds of little monsters that would help characterize Empire and all but define Band’s next company, Full Moon Features.
Troll wasn’t a big hit when it was released into theaters in early 1986, and wouldn’t really find its audience until home video and cable TV. It’s easy to see why, too: it had (in the great Empire tradition) a cool VHS cover box, and because of its PG-13 rating could be aired on HBO at all hours of the day, meaning kids could be exposed to its what-the-fuck weirdness and return to it over and over again in an attempt to master their own kindertrauma. Scenes like the one in which Sonny Bono (!) bubbles and oozes and ultimately transforms into a green pod are the stuff of childhood nightmares. Troll’s willingness to be strange and sort of scary is a major benefit of hiring a hard-edged horror maker like Buechler to direct – he softens some of the intensity of his usual effects work, but chooses not to dull it completely.
As a narrative, Troll isn’t especially compelling or coherent. That’s not what makes the movie memorable. It’s the margins that make it special, whether it’s the casting of Julie Louis Dreyfus and June Lockhart and the aforementioned Sonny Bono in supporting roles, or a scene of Larry Cohen regular/giant weirdo Michael Moriarty dancing and lip syncing to “Summertime Blues,” or a touching monologue from Phil Fondacaro about being sick and realizing at a young age that he wasn’t going to grow any bigger. Buechler uses the film’s plot as merely a clothesline upon which to hang a bunch of colorful and offbeat stuff, and that’s where his interests lie.
Buechler didn’t direct many movies, but most of his work was characterized by that kind of weirdness. Even his most high-profile effort, Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, introduces telekinetic powers into what was otherwise a straightforward slasher franchise. His entry in the Ghoulies series sends the little monsters to a college campus and has them speak for the first time. Buechler’s movies revel in the strange and unusual which, when combined with his penchant for imaginative practical effects, take on a kind of surreal quality. Troll is the same way, growing more bizarre and surreal as it progresses until Buechler unleashes his pièce de résistance: a character is turned into a talking tree stump and an enormous bat monster troll attacks our young heroes. That Troll somehow earns this sequence is a testament to its own insanity. Insanity was one of Beuchler’s great gifts, even when it came to designing makeup effects and gore gags.
Troll would eventually be overshadowed by its sequel, the endlessly watchable and borderline inept Troll 2, one of the most notorious cult films of the last 50 years. It exists these days mostly in the memories of those of us who grew up watching it on cable and video (or as the answer to a trivia question about the “other” Harry Potter movie). In honor of John Carl Buechler’s passing, though, maybe it could be reconsidered as part of a larger body of work – a celebration of practical effects, of imagination, of the endless potential of the strange. Buechler poured his heart into every rubber monster he made, every movie he directed. Even a goofy one like Troll.
*As reported in Empire of the Bs by Dave Jay, Torsten Dewi, and Nathan Shumate.
