“Troll” Remake in the Works

John Carl Buechler, the creator and director of such 80’s horror fare  as “Cellar Dweller” and “Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood,” is looking to revive another of his horrific vision from that decade, “Troll.”

“I’m getting ready to remake a film that I did back in 1985,” Buechler tells SciFi Wire. “It’s a little movie called ‘Troll’ that is likely to be fairly controversial when I do it; that’s part of the reason why some of the hurdles that I’ve been jumping through to get the movie financially secure have been what they’ve been. But it is now quite financially secure, and I’ve got everything in place, so we’re going to make some major announcements with regard to cast and other specifics.”

The original was Buechler’s directoral debut and he says suffers from budget-constraints.   The budget woes of the original kept him from realizing his true vision for the film, something he says won’t be the case this time around.

I think the remake promises to be so much better than the original,” he said. “I have so much passion for it that there was no other alternative but ‘I gotta direct it.’ I know that I can bring to it what I wanted to initially, [because] I was very much surprised the first time around with a radical budget cut a month before shooting. We had to sort of change our whole approach from a more serious, darker kind of a project into, well, ‘We can’t really show it, so we have to talk about it, so we have to play it more for laughs now.'”

Buechler reassured fans that some of those familiar elements from the original would remain in the new version. “The first film, I think it’s fine as it is in terms of it is a campy little kids’ film, but now I don’t have to make it that way,” he explained. “But because of the existence of the first movie there has to be some of that aspect in there as well. So it’s a hybrid of tone; it’s still going to have some of the humor, but it’s going to be more ironic as opposed to winking at the camera. I won’t have to play it light. I mean, on the first one I got 10 percent of what those things were capable of, so now I’ve got more money, I’ve got more time, and what I can’t do physically with animatronics and prosthetics, I’ll do CGI.”

No word yet on when this new version will go into production. But the director did promise he’d work on cameos for the original cast in the new film.

“”I’ve talked to Annie [Lockhart], and I’ve talked to Noah [Hathaway], and there are folks that are very interested; one person will reprise their role, and that will be Phil Fondacare,” he said. “But the character of the troll is going to be played completely by someone else, a person of great stature, because we see Torok before he becomes a troll, and we see him after he transforms back into the person that he was. He also plays the personality and the voice of the troll.”