The makeup and creature effects in Troll are outstanding, but something about the movie turned off my attention early in the story and it never recovered it. I had to force myself to continue watching.

The story: Harry and Anne Potter (Michael Moriarty and Shelley Hack) are moving into an apartment building in a new city when their daughter Wendy (Jenny Beck) chases her ball into the basement and comes face-to-face with a troll named Turoc (Phil Fondacaro). The troll mimics Wendy's body and begins turning the apartment residents into cocoons that produce baby trolls. He turns the apartments into fairy worlds. Once he gets all the apartments changed, they will unite and the fairy universe will burst forth and wipe out all humans except one fair-haired maiden who will become the princess of the fairy world.

Her family notices the changes in Wendy, but only Harry Jr. (Noah Hathaway) realizes that it is not her. In his attempts to avoid her, he runs across Eunice St. Clair (June Lockhart), another resident in the building. Eunice was Turoc's true love when the fairies tried to conquer the humans the first time. She is there to try to stop him. She poses as a sweet, older lady until the fight nears. Then she releases her hair and is transformed into a beautiful, young woman (Anne Lockhart).

Turoc has all the apartments except the Potters' and Eunice's. It is going to be humans vs trolls in a death match, and the world hangs in the balance.

I cannot put my finger on exactly when I lost interest in the movie, but I believe it was when Sonny Bono turned into a vine/tree-sprouting cocoon.

The troll certainly looks scary and repulsive enough, but there is not one point in the entire movie when my pulse quickened or I felt tense. Just bored.

If my only reaction to a horror movie is laughter at one of the character's dancing (You go, Michael Moriarty) then I have to strongly urge you to pass it by. That is definitely the case here. For the same cost, I can watch the dancing in Strictly Ballroom or Dirty Dancing and really get a thrill. Thus, I cannot find the merit to this movie.

Troll simply does not do anything for the viewer. It is a flatline movie and needs to be left with the distributor.