October Edition #21: FROGS

Director: George McCowan
Screenplay: Robert Hutchison, Robert Blees
Starring: Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke
Release Date: 1972


Okay, so I’m going to have to keep today’s entry brief as my work schedule is cutting into my free time today, and this movie is really not worth wasting much time on anyway. FROGS is an unfortunate nature-run-amok movie in which not a lot happens, with very little explanation, to a group of powerfully stupid and reprehensible characters.

Pickett Smith and the Raiders of the Lost Mustache

The flick stars a disturbingly un-mustachioed Sam Elliott , who plays a nature photographer named Pickett Smith, a man whose name sounds like the punchline to a joke that I don’t understand. While taking photographs of the Florida swampland in his canoe, he is nearly run over by drunken speedboater Clint Crockett (Roarke), who apologetically brings Pickett back to his grandfather’s private island, referred to as Crockettland. His grandfather is Jason Crockett (Milland), an immensely wealthy, crotchety old bastard confined to a wheelchair. All of his family and heirs have converged on the island for his annual Fourth of July and birthday celebration. “Crockettland” is a hellish bog, teeming with swampy wildlife of every variety, most notably an infestation of enormous frogs, whose incessant croaking day and night is driving the Crockett’s up the wall. Crockett’s solution to this annoyance is to have his groundskeeper completely douse the island in pesticides and poisons. Of course it doesn’t work, only serving to piss off the surrounding wildlife including tarantulas, gila monsters, a multitude of snakes, alligators and the titular frogs. On the day of the celebration he holds most sacred, Crockett’s family and servants are laid to waste in an orgy of violence that threatens to spill out of the confines of his island and into the rest of the world.

Just thought I'd remind you folks, the name of the movie is....FROGS.

A rare scene from FROGS in which "something" allegedly "happens".

The above description makes this sound like a great big bag of dumb-ass fun, but truth of the matter is that FROGS is a big boring bag of bile and shit whose insipidness is surpassed only by its sheer stupidity and utter contempt for the intellect of its viewers. For starters, never mind the numbingly awful performances and non-existent character progression. The fucking movie is called FROGS, but the frogs don’t take part in any of the goddamn killing! All they do is look pissed off and croak a lot, in a series of shots that get reused about a thousand times in the flick’s blessedly brief running time. The characters keep talking about how many of them are surrounding the mansion, yet we never see more than about ten of them sitting on the same patio, occasionally bouncing off the glass of the window. Not one single death in this movie can be attributed to them, though by the end of the movie I wished I was dead after having to listen to their incessant croaking for an hour and a half.

Ha! Real subtle, movie!

The bulk of the movie is made up of scenes of repugnant characters wandering off into the swamp and being attacked by stock footage of various animals. In every instance they idiotically leave the trail and stagger through the brush for a few minutes, tripping over every blade of grass, before finally succumbing to nature’s wrath. They have almost no interaction with any of the animals, save for the requisite shots of their corpses covered in whatever creature happened to be chasing them. So a guy gets webbed up and bitten to death by angry tarantulas, some lizards knock over some jars of poison, releasing noxious fumes that kill one of Crockett’s grandsons, some dude unsuccessfully wrestles an alligator, and one chick gets her feet stuck in the mud and is somehow killed, off screen, by a snapping turtle. My favorite bit of business involves an escape attempt in which Clint agrees to try to use his speed boat to get to the main land, and the only people who get in the boat with him are the three black members of the cast, so we know they’re fucking doomed. I was hoping this movie wouldn’t fall into that trap, but yeah, they don’t make it to the end credits.

The worst high five you could ever hope to receive.

John Stamos experiences one of the horrifying side effects of switching to Geico.

So we’ve got a bunch of rotten, unlikable characters with ridiculous names like Crockett and Pickett meandering through a functionally retarded storyline in which they are menaced by stock footage of normal, everyday swamp creatures, punctuated by the endless din of apocalyptic amphibious assholes. At the end it’s suggested that the animals have probably maybe taken over the world, or something. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’d sooner watch the infant-raping scene from A SERBIAN FILM set to Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, on an infinite loop, than subject myself to this miserable pile of putrid piss again.

My Rating:
3/10