It started as a student project to investigate the discovery of bear carcasses around the more remote parts of Norway. These three amateur filmmakers shot interview footage of various locals and hunters who were complaining that someone was killing the animals without any permit, and they thought they knew who it was. Therefore before long the students were pursuing the mysterious Hans (Otto Jespersen), a shadowy figure seen around the locations of the carcasses, and the man they believed had been responsible...
But as you may have guessed from that title, it was not bears which Hans concerns himself with, nope, he has bigger fish to fry - or bigger monsters. The found footage genre made popular by The Blair Witch Project had yet another entry in this Norwegian effort, and once more confounded those who said that enough was enough and there was nothing more to be done with the medium because although it was derivative, by placing a spin on it from their own nation they came up with something fresh and amusing. Obviously not everyone outside of Norway was going to catch all the references, but even that did not matter too much.
This was thanks to the invention of the filmmakers, who took their single idea - that trolls were real and not the stuff of fairytales - and truly ran with it, walking a surprisingly delicate tightrope between taking this very seriously and winking at the audience that it was something of a joke as well. There was neither a tipping over to one side or the other, but you could find yourself going "woah!" or laughing in equal amounts throughout the film, without it committing itself to being outright comedy or blatant horror. Here was something too absurd to be scary, but visually impressive thanks to its mixture of lovely landscapes and innovative special effects lending a sense of awe.
Not bad on a low budget, and it had you not bothered that the plot here was as flimsy as the proof for the towering beasts this professed to supply. A series of captions at the beginning in Blair Witch style claimed what we were about to see was a rough edit of many hours of footage handed in to the producers without any explanation, and so we had to make up our own minds about how authentic it was. This elicited the other aspect to the yarn, that this was a conspiracy movie because the Norwegian government was keeping the existence of trolls a big secret, again hard to swallow but adding a neat layer to what could have simply been a goofy special effects showcase.
Mind you, there were times you would have thought you were watching that as well, and the fact that Norwegian viewers would have recognised resident satirist Jespersen almost immediately would have been lost on foreigners contributed to the overall feeling that this was a jape on a particularly enterprising scale. That central conceit may have been spun out for a little too long, but the variations on it the filmmakers thought up were consistently entertaining, from the worries that any Christians present may be in big trouble because trolls can smell their blood to the powerful ultraviolet lamps Hans employs to turn his prey to stone or messily explode them. Those creatures were especially well-deployed, cartoonish in a massive Muppet kind of way, but containing plenty of imposing charm, as the film around them did. You may think that once you had heard the plot summary you had pretty much seen the movie, but give it a chance and you would likely find it highly diverting.
