Butler's Cinema Scene

“TROLLHUNTER” My rating: B- (Opening July 22 at the Screenland Crossroads)

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

The Norwegian “TrollHunter” purports to be footage left behind by members of a college film crew who have mysterious vanished.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Actually, André Øvredal’s film, an amusing mashup of elements from “The Blair Witch Project” seasoned with a bit of “Men in Black,” is a lot more entertaining than you’d expect given its by-now-cliched premise.

Maybe it’s the way the film wields its uber-dry sense of humor, presenting with a straight face thoroughly fanciful, nay, absurd notions.

Our student filmmakers are on-camera interviewer Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen), sound girl Johanna (Johanna Morck) and cameraman Thoms (Glenn Erland Tosterud…who is heard but rarely seen for obvious reasons).

As the movie starts they are trying to do an expose about wildlife deaths in rugged fiord country. There are rumors of rapacious poachers, and the three fledgling moviemakers  think they have a suspect in a bearded, middle-aged guy who drives a beat-up all-terrain vehicle and tows a mobile home that gives off an unidentifiable reek.

This surly fellow is Hans (Otto Jesperson) who tries to elude the young filmmakers, then changes his mind and invites them to accompany him on his nocturnal prowlings in the forest.

He appears to be a hunter, but he has no guns. Instead Hans is armed with battery-powered ultraviolet lights.

The kids think he’s a harmless mental case until they get a glimpse of his prey: trolls.

That’s right, those fairy tale creatures that live in caves or under bridges.

Hans, it turns out, has spent his adult life as a sort of game warden for a covert government agency that monitors, studies and attempts to control Norway’s trolls — without letting the general population in on the secret.

These creatures, which can be destroyed by sunlight, come in several varieties. They’re big, stupid and create problems when they wander off their “reservations” or abandon their diet of boulders for one of livestock and the occasional camper.

Anyway, after years of stomping about the woods at night, sleeping in a fetid trailer and daubing himself with viscous troll saliva (so he won’t smell human and scare off his prey), Hans is fed up. Defying the protocols, he tells the students to film anything they like. He’s sick of the secrecy. He’s ready to go public.

Otto Jesperson is the Trollhunter

Jesperson, known mostly as a TV actor in Norway, is a deadpan hoot as the troll hunter, who approaches his fantastic tasks with the workmanlike, matter-of-fact attitude of a plumber deciding how to deal with a broken pipe.

There’s one sublime sight gag when Hans goes into battle decked out in cast-iron armor like an extra from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”

Trolls, of course, are as important to Norwegian culture as leprechauns are to the Irish, and the film has a jolly old time toying with the cliches. As depicted here, they look like illustrations from Grimm’s come to life (big beaky noses, lots of hair, stupid expressions).

At one point Hans grills the students on their religious beliefs, since trolls can easily sniff out Christians. When one crew member admits to being Muslim, he scratches his head and opines that they’ll just have to see how that works out.

| Robert W. Butler