Ray Milland won a Best Actor Oscar courtesy of his spirited dip into dipsomania in Billy Wilder’s Lost Weekend (1946), so let’s cut him some slack for Frogs, an unintentionally hilarious stinker from American International Pictures.
First things first: At no point in the film is anyone eaten by a giant frog. The poster is complete bullshit.
Since it’s a horror movie with an environmental message, Milland is cast as Jason Crockett, a venomous industrialist in a wheelchair ruling over a polluted private island plantation, fussed over by his feckless family intent on currying the old man’s financial favor.
Keeping Milland company is a naked-lipped Sam Elliott playing Pickett Smith, a hippie nature photographer in a canoe accidentally swamped by Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke), one of the patriarch’s progeny of sycophants and spoiled brats.
The exception is Karen Crockett (Joan Van Ark from Knot’s Landing), a lovely and luminous free spirit, who naturally gravitates to Smith, the stranger in the group, and the only other decent human being for miles.
It seems the senior Crockett wants his island free of frogs, and presumably snakes, spiders, gators, gulls, geckos, skinks, skunks, squirrels, and any other member of the animal kingdom that dares show its face.
“I still believe man is master of the universe,” he sneers at Smith.
Crockett instructs his minions to spray pesticides on the flora and fauna surrounding the estate. The flora and fauna don’t care for this one bit and mount a counter attack.
There is not a single sequence in the movie that isn’t punctuated (padded) with additional nature footage of creeping critters hopping and slithering closer to the Crockett house. Frogs are lobbed haphazardly into frame by production assistants, occasionally piling up in abundance, and photographed from menacing low angles to show they clearly mean business.
Directed by TV veteran George McCowan, Frogs boasts some of the most howlingly cheap and awful death scenes ever, rivaling poor Bela Lugosi wrestling an inanimate octopus in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster.
I was reminded of this as I watched Stuart Martindale (George Skaff), a bald guy in a velour suit, forced to grapple with an unconscious crocodile.
A snapping turtle claims one victim! Another gets lost in the swamp chasing butterflies, and after what seems like several weeks of wandering and weeping, finally succumbs to a surfeit of snake bites.
Yet another of Crockett’s foppish relatives ends up poisoned in a closed greenhouse thanks to a bunch of reptiles shattering multiple bottles of industrial strength pesticide, as is their wont.
The best/worst demise, undoubtedly belongs to Michael Martindale (David Gilliam), which involves being cocooned by moss and having spiders spilled upon his person, including one right in the mouth.
As for Ray Milland, the conservative think-tank commander goes down with the ship, deserted by everyone including his dog. He is seen taking his final agonizing breath amidst another barrage of tossed toads, glaringly accompanied to the grave by Les Baxter’s shrieking, atonal score.
What a sorry way to croak!
Frogs isn’t so bad it’s good. But the low-rent laughs are all over the place, just like the titular terrors who pounce on Crockett’s star-spangled birthday cake, ruining his crappy family celebration.
Remember: Environment good! Old rich white men bad! Too bad this populist message didn’t help George McGovern in ’72.
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