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So, Marissa, what talking points do you want to hit on in this week's episode? Well, Jackie, let's talk about how the film addresses the patriarchy, ooh, and representation of marginalized people, ooh, ooh, and even philosophical ramifications of good versus evil and horror. We can point out the triangle boobs, talk about the blood splatter, and, ugh, the practical effects. Um, and also the male gaze?
My gaze at the males. Hi-oh! From feminism to fangirling, the Jersey Ghouls cover all the bases of horror from a woman's perspective. New episodes are uploaded every other Sunday.
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Well, Jackie, let's talk about how the film addresses the patriarchy. Ooh, and representation of marginalized people. Ooh, ooh, and even philosophical ramifications of good versus evil in horror. We can point out the triangle boobs, talk about the blood splatter, and, ugh, the practical effects.
Um, and also the male gaze? My gaze at the males. Hi-oh! From feminism to fangirling, the Jersey Ghouls cover all the bases of horror from a woman's perspective.
New episodes are uploaded every other Sunday. Just search Jersey Ghouls to find us on social media and your favorite podcasting app. Alright, guys, dropping you one more bonus episode. We mentioned this briefly, but years ago, I had a podcast called The St.
Mort Show. So, most of The St. Mort Show has been lost to the sands of time, except for on a hard drive of mine. And I dug around and found this.
The very first interview for the very first thing that I ever did for The St. Mort Show was a segment called Skyping with the Stars, in which I Skyped with George Hardy of Troll 2 fame. And I just wanted you to tune in and enjoy this very vintage interview that I did with the star of Troll 2. Alright, and we're premiering our new segment called Skyping with the Stars.
Our first star is the star of the movie Troll 2. And the documentary Best Worst Movie, we have George Hardy here. Hello, hello. How you doing today, George?
Hey, fine. It's kind of funny to be called a star, you know? I don't think most folks that would be listening to this would ever imagine that I'm actually a general dentist in Alabama, you know? It's the Best Worst Movie.
It's a great movie. It's getting a lot of buzz. I've been seeing it on Facebook and Twitter. People have been putting on a lot of their top ten lists of the year.
I know. It's amazing. And I was among one of them, actually, on Geekscape's list. Oh, yeah.
Thank you. Thank you. No problem. It's a wonderful movie about wonderful people, and it's wonderful to see.
It seems like it's really a movie about people who had this dream that they thought was over with. And they're seeing that they really did make an impact, even though it might not specifically be the impact that they intended. Exactly. Now, there's one person in the documentary that grabbed my attention the most I wanted to ask you about was the director, Claudio.
Sure. Of all the people, he seemed the most reluctant to take on the title of being the director of the worst movie of all time, which is understandable. But it says that him and his wife are working on Troll 2 Part 2. Is there something that they didn't show about how he eventually came to terms with the title?
I mean, what exactly was the story with Claudio? Because it didn't really show at the end if he was all right with this or not. I really think that Michael really was able to capture the true essence of most of all of us that he interviewed, especially Claudio, the director of Troll 2. You know, the fact that he did direct probably the worst, one of the worst films ever made, according to millions of people that have seen.
You know, we've had movies and put it up there as one of the top 100. In fact, it hit about 100 in April of 2006 when we stumbled across it on IMDb, and that's where the whole kick start of the documentary came about. So, you know, fast forward 18 years later since Troll 2 was made. Yes, you know, Claudio has become known as the director of one of the worst films ever.
But, you know, I think what the essence that was caught in Best of the movie is that Claudio is truly an artist. And he paints a film on canvas, like, you know, a painter would paint on canvas. And so he just, it doesn't matter to him whether it's good or bad. It's all about making an impression.
And, obviously, it made a huge impression of all the movies he's ever made. It's made the biggest impression. You know, he's probably made about 30, 40 movies in his career. And Claudio has definitely become known.
And I don't think it hurts his feelings. I don't think he's angry about it. He laughs with us about it. And now, and he's just such a likable guy.
And I think that, you know, truly, you know, there is one part of the documentary where Claudio says, these actors dogs, you know, they are nothing. They are nothing. They are nobodies, talking about me and the rest of the cast members. And, you know, but that's, I think that's, that's something that's translated a little differently in, you know, our language.
And he's just basically saying that, you know, we really, we really aren't anybody. And he's right, we really aren't. Now, how did, how did you and Michael, and, I mean, I guess the rest of the cast, but really, the way it seemed to me, anyway, you and Michael were kind of the first ones to discover this insane fan base. Where, you know, where, how did you guys first come upon the following that you guys actually had?
Yeah, again, you know, after Troll 2 was made in 1989, I, shortly after we got married, moved back to Alabama. And, you know, I just kind of thought, well, maybe it'll come out one day on video. This is way before DVDs, you know. And it might be possible that Troll 2 might make it to the big screen.
And we all kind of thought, oh, it might. But you've got to understand, when we made the film Troll 2, we had no clue what we were doing. We didn't understand the direction because it's all Italian. You know, it's a whole Italian film crew that made the movie Troll 2.
And I keep going back to the documentary movie. You know, back in 1989, we just did the best we could. We were all non-actors. And we all did have a whole, hey, it would be cool if we could be on the big screen one day.
You know, little did we know that through Michael and I, Michael Stevens and I, you know, Michael was playing, he played my son in Troll 2. He and I brought it back to the big screen in America through landmark theaters and other independent film theaters. And we documented all that, of course, for Best West Movie. Well, I mean, thank God you did.
I think that being someone who knew of Troll 2 before the documentary, I've also found so many people who've never even heard of the film but heard of the documentary and went back and revisited it. Well, visited it for the first time, and I was more than happy to help them revisit Troll 2 for its appeal. How about all the random – there's a lot of random showings that you guys went to where even you guys weren't a part of it. I think one of them was like an Atkins research group and stuff like that.
How did you even find a lot of these or, you know, the guy who brought Troll 2 to Iraq? So that's so great. You know what? You know, Michael had read the movie, had read the book, The Tipping Point, and he talked about mavens.
He talked about mavens, who are people that actually go out and spread the news. You're probably a maven for Troll 2, for example, Matthew, and the fact that you're such a Troll 2 fan. You'll tell somebody else about this, you know, underground classic, you know. And there's millions of mavens out there now about Troll 2, hundreds of thousands.
You've got to see this movie. Oh, my God, it's so bad. So Michael and I put together a website. Michael had left the industry, the film industry, for a while in Salt Lake, and he ended up having his own web ads company.
And so through his smart ideas and creative ways, we put a website together. It was called the official Troll 2 website. And now there's well over 200,000 members in that website that we put together four years ago. And people would write in, and they would tell us where they were having Troll 2 parties, and they'd send us films and send us pictures from all over.
And this is pretty Facebook. And so through MySpace at the time, we were getting a lot of information. And then people would seek Michael out and find his e-mail and send the e-mail pictures to Michael. So we were able to find out, you know, that there was a fan, for example, in Austria.
There was a fan in Bootha's home. There's several fans in Iceland, and there's fans here, you know, in Iraq and there in France. So we thought, you know, let's go find these fans. And so we took off and went to eight countries and filmed in 24 cities and documented filming Best Worst Movie, you know, just tell the story of the world, the story about Troll 2.
Now, are we going to be able to see some more George Hardy in the future in films? Yeah, well, you know, that's really wild. I just got out of the film with Michael Stevenson, and we've been approached, and I've been asked to do a reality show. And we're looking at a concept for that, and there's several people that are producers of that do a reality show.
It's still going to look like for me to host one. Honestly, I've done three other films since Best Worst Movie, and I did a film called Junk with a fellow named Kevin Hamadani, who did a film called Zombies and Mass Destruction in 2008, and he got quite a bit of film festival recognition from that. And so some guys from up in Seattle put him up for another movie, and he's called it Junk. And myself and my daughter flew up to Brooklyn about a month and a half ago and filmed a cameo there.
And also, you might want to know if you're a bad film fan, The Room, of course. Everybody's just arguing, oh, The Room's the worst film ever made, or Planet 9 is, you know, Troll 2, no, it's not true. You know, we have a lot of fun with that. But the female lead from The Room, myself and the male lead from Bird Demick, another movie that movie, just did a cameo scene in a New Zealand film called Ghost Shark 2, Urban Jaws.
And as you might know, there is no Urban Shark 1, correct? Yeah, that's right. There's no Urban Shark 1. And so Alan Ball, myself and Juliette Warden, the three of us, had a really fun day in Los Angeles about three or four months ago.
And we were ready to film for some guys. And we psyched, in fact, with the director from New Zealand, and he helped us out with that. And it was a lot of fun. That's coming out in 2011, and so will, I think 2011-12.
I think Sundance might have the opportunity to show Junk. So hopefully it'll hit that film festival. So, yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And, you know, it's funny.
If you watch Best of Worst movie, you guys, it asks me if I ever wanted to act again. As I said, I'm a general business and all that. But I have to say my heart, really. I pretty much am.
I love comedy. I just have a whole lot of fun, you know, being in front of people. And, you know, just really getting to, like I said earlier, the Hemosagia folks and just have fun with it. And I'd love to interview you like you do with me.
And so, you know, something might come of it. You know, I'm like, you know, one day you get something, you know, that comes out of the blue. Let's get something really big. You never know.
That's exciting. I can't believe I'm excited for this reality show. I hope something comes from that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's just talk right now. It's in the works. And, yeah, no, I mean, you know, I don't know, Matthew, to me, a lot of reality shows are really boring. And they're trash.
And I just think that there could be a really fun concept that could, you know, come about with Best of Us or something like that. You don't know, you know. Yeah, you could do, like, an anti-Project Greenlight. Like, instead of helping them make a big Hollywood movie, you help them make a low-budget movie.
Yeah, that'd be kind of fun. You know, I love budget stuff. You know, what is it, an American movie? You know, it won the Sundance Film Festival back in the 80s.
You know, have you seen that documentary? Yeah, did he ever finish that movie? I feel like he's been making the same film for, like, five years. I have to tell you, I have a really good friend that I met in those screens over the past few years.
James Eates. And James is such a sweetheart. He's in Chicago. He fell in love with Troll 2 and fell in love with Best of Us movie.
And one night, Ron Howard and his crew was in Chicago, and they really wanted to come out and see Best of Us movie. And Ron was a huge fan of Troll 2. I don't know a huge fan of Troll 2, but he really heard a lot about Best of Us movie. And Ron was filming in Chicago.
And I think his newest film is out of the comedy. He's got out right now. I forget the name of it. But anyway, Ron wanted to come that night.
And Ron didn't make it, but he sent his team in. And it was really fun to be able to show the documentary to his crew. And out of the audience, there's a film in James Eates. And James, who isn't going into this, is James, you know, he just really became a good friend of ours.
He took us back to the hotel and showed us around in Chicago. And he, too, had become really close friends with the guys that made American Movie. And he's not from Milwaukee, so he went up and visited them. And he tells me all about those two guys.
And I got on the phone with the guys that made American Movie, and they just sent him up to screen. So I've been really fortunate to be exposed to so many things, you know, over the last four or five years of my life. You know, filming and, you know, being a main subject of a documentary and also seeing the resurgence of a movie that, like you said, you know, it's a train wreck. We never thought would ever happen.
And that becomes a center of attention to it all. It's a pretty wild story, really. Well, thank you so much, George, for doing this. Is there anywhere where people can go to find out more about, you know, where they can see George Hardy in these future films?
Well, yeah, on IMDb, you can kind of see what I've been up to a little bit on that. I'm not really one of the huge professional person on the Internet Movie database, but you can keep helping me probably there. And, you know, I'd love to invite any of you guys to be my Facebook friend that listen in. I'm just George Hardy on Facebook.
And, you know, you can kind of always – I'm not a really big tweeter. I still – Matthew, do you understand tweeting? Is it Twitter or I don't know? I just had a hard time.
Twitter's the site. Tweeting's what you do on it. I just don't really understand. It doesn't seem any way as exciting or fun as, you know, keep telling what's going on with Facebook.
For example, today on Facebook, I posted, you know, watch your status or something like that. What's going on with you right now or whatever? And I asked the question. I posed the question.
What's the name of your city spelled backwards? As you know, in Troll 2, you know, Neal Dog is Goblin spelled backwards. And so I posed the question. What's the name of your city spelled backwards?
And you would not believe the response. I think within three hours, I had over 100 people writing me in, spelling their town or their city backwards. All over the world, too. It's amazing.
So you couldn't do that in tweeting. I guess you could, but I just don't know. Safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails.
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So, Marissa, what talking points do you want to hit on in this week's episode? Well, Jackie, let's talk about how the film addresses the patriarchy. Ooh, and representation of marginalized people. Ooh, ooh, and even philosophical ramifications of good versus evil in horror.
We can point out the triangle boobs, talk about the blood splatter, and, oh, the practical effects. Um, and also the male gaze? My gaze at the males. Hi-oh!
From feminism to fan-barreling, the Jersey Ghouls cover all the bases of horror from a woman's perspective. New episodes are uploaded every other Sunday. Just search Jersey Ghouls to find us on social media and your favorite podcasting app. You're listening to the Geek State Network.