2006 Fantasy Film

Suppose your introduction to show business, at the tender age of 10 ½,was a starring role in a low-budget horror movie that, for a time, was deemed by the users of the Internet Movie Database to be the worst movie ever. Some people might handle that embarrassment by omitting the credit from their résumé and hoping it never was discovered; others might be shamed out of the industry altogether. But one man made a film about this experience to share it with as many people as possible.

This is the origin story of “Best Worst Movie,” a documentary by Michael Paul Stephenson that opens at the Village East Cinema in Manhattan on Friday. For his directorial debut Mr. Stephenson, 32, the grown-up former child star of “Troll 2,” has told the story of that 1990 direct-to-video dud and how it found a second life among viewers who gather to celebrate its awfulness.

“Troll 2” is hardly the only film these days to have built a cult following on its so-bad-it’s-good status. That same quality has turned recent amateur efforts like “The Room” and “Birdemic” into unexpected hits on the midnight screening circuit.

But “Best Worst Movie” makes a bolder assertion: For Mr. Stephenson and his “Troll 2” colleagues the documentary is an act of reclamation — an effort to make both sense of a senseless film and an argument that no movie with a fan following can be totally without value.

“You hear this term ‘guilty pleasure,’ ” Mr. Stephenson said in a telephone interview. “If you like something, what are you guilty of? Either you like it or you don’t.” Nobody is equating “Troll 2” with “Citizen Kane,” he added, “But it has heart, and was made with pure intent.”

It should be noted that “Troll 2” has no sanctioned connection to “Troll,” the 1986 fantasy film about a mythical beast set loose in a San Francisco apartment building that turns a young Julia Louis-Dreyfus into a nymph.

In “Troll 2,” directed by the Italian filmmaker Claudio Fragasso and written with his wife, Rossella Drudi, an American family is pursued on vacation by a horde of ugly creatures who seek to turn them into plants and eat them. (As Ms. Drudi explains in “Best Worst Movie,” the plot was a sarcastic commentary on her vegetarian friends.)

Mr. Fragasso intended to call the film “Goblin,” until its distributors changed its name in hopes of capitalizing on its unofficial predecessor.

This became a moot point as “Troll 2” never received a theatrical release in the United States. Also, as a movie, “it fails in every regard,” Mr. Stephenson said. “The acting — we were horrible. The directing, the writing, special effects. But it did not fail to leave an impression.”

When Mr. Stephenson moved to Los Angeles in 2006 and joined MySpace to further his acting and screenwriting career, he began hearing from online fans who knew “Troll 2” in intricate detail, and invited him to screenings and reunion events.

Around this time Mr. Stephenson was reconnected with Dr. George Hardy, the dentist and would-be actor who played his father in “Troll 2.”

Dr. Hardy, who now has a private practice in Alexander City, Ala., never saw “Troll 2” after he shot the film in Utah (on a break from a post-doctoral program). In a telephone interview he said he learned of the movie’s release from his sister after she saw it on cable television.

“She goes, ‘I’ve got to tell you something: It’s bad,’ ” Dr. Hardy recalled. “I said, ‘Well, how bad is it?’ She says, ‘It’s really bad.’ I said, ‘Well, how bad is really bad?’ ”

However, at a “Troll 2” screening that Mr. Stephenson and Dr. Hardy attended at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan in 2006, they were greeted like celebrities. “I felt like Gilligan out of ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ or maybe somebody from ‘Star Trek,’ ” Dr. Hardy said.

Mr. Stephenson was particularly inspired by the fans’ reactions to Dr. Hardy. “I’m thinking: Yesterday, this guy was in Alabama, drilling teeth; today he’s signing autographs,” Mr. Stephenson said. “Here’s the heart of the story.”

Curtis Gwinn, a comedian who helped organize the “Troll 2” screenings at the Manhattan theater, said that Dr. Hardy’s folksy charm was crucial to the film’s appeal.

“He’s got this action-dad quality, this paterfamilias vibe to him,” Mr. Gwinn said. “He has a likability that comes through on camera, even though the movie is hateful and stupid.”

Mr. Gwinn said Mr. Stephenson and Dr. Hardy were both trying to capitalize on the cult success of “Troll 2,” but in a way that did not alienate their fans.

“They’re both definitely hustlers,” he said. “I think they both want this to do well for them, and I wish them well. I want them to do well.”

Together Mr. Stephenson and Dr. Hardy spent nearly four years documenting their pilgrimages to “Troll 2”-theme events and locations, traveling to some 28 cities in 8 countries. Their itinerary included stops in Italy, where they visited with Mr. Fragasso and Ms. Drudi, and Utah, where they re-enacted scenes from “Troll 2” in the locations where they had been filmed.

Mr. Fragasso said he was proud that the movie had found a following in the United States. Speaking through an interpreter during a telephone interview, he said: “In Italy you need to die before people can really admit that your movie was good. In America people can change their mind and then appreciate the movie.”

For Dr. Hardy and Mr. Stephenson, that pride turns to a kind of revulsion over the course of “Best Worst Movie,” as they are asked to perform their “Troll 2” dialogue over and over again. Comparing his plight to Celine Dion, who must sing “My Heart Will Go On” at all of her concerts, Dr. Hardy asked, “How could she sing that song 5,000 times? It’s the same thing with me.”

And Mr. Stephenson said he felt no connection to the fellow actors and filmmakers he met at the horror-movie conventions he has since sworn off. “Nobody looked like they were having a good time,” he said. “It just smelled of dead careers.”

But in the end Mr. Stephenson said the making of “Best Worst Movie” had given him a new understanding of the film that began his career.

“This whole process, it’s messed me up so bad that I can’t even say ‘Troll 2’ is a bad movie anymore,” he said.

Not that it meets its narrative or aesthetic goals, he explained, but: “Twenty years later you have hundreds of kids coming to a theater to have a shared communal experience. How many films, really, would kill for something like that?”

In Italy, Mr. Fragasso said that he too was inspired. He hopes to create a sequel to “Troll 2,” a “low-budget, funny movie with the same actors, probably in Utah, with the same spirit of the other movie.”

Dr. Hardy said it would be hard to resist such a project if it really comes together.

“My practical self says: ‘Oh, no, George, you couldn’t do that. You couldn’t leave your patients.”

But in conversations with Mr. Stephenson, Dr. Hardy recalled, “Michael said to me, ‘George, if Will Ferrell called you tomorrow, would you take the job or not?’ Of course you would.”

Upon further reflection Dr. Hardy said: “For sure, I’m an actor at heart. To be honest, I’m a ham.”