Trog

Trog (1970)

Dir Freddie Francis

Written by Peter Bryan, John Gilling, Aben Kandel

Starring Joan Crawford, Michael Gough, Bernard Kay

            Once upon a time in rural England, three handsome young men (including future genre staple David Warbeck, RAT MAN) strip down to their underwear and explore, one at a time, the inside of a deep, previously undisturbed crevasse. The eyebrow-raising Freudian implications thereof take a backseat to the potential scientific ones, however, when they encounter a pissed-off long-time resident of the cave who kills one of them and sends the rest fleeing to the safety of a laboratory headed by the inexplicably American Dr. Brockton (holy mackerel, it's Academy Award Winner Joan Crawford! From 1926’s THE BOOB!). Obviously, we’ve got some kind of relict pre-human ape man on our hands here. Predictably, the ignorant locals, especially this total dipshit Mr. Murdock (Michael Gough, 90’s BATMAN QUADRILOGY, THE SKULL) want to kill the cave-dwelling “troglodyte,” but Dr. Brockton and her extensive collection of large-collared button-down jackets have the crazy idea that a living Trog might be a great benefit to science, especially that newfangled and still-controversial theory of evolution.*

            So far, so standard for a creature feature like this. Despite the odd murder or two, the movie understands that we’re squarely on Trog’s side here; he’s who we came to see, although of course we assume we’ll only get a few fleeting glimpses of him, budgets being what they are. And of course we can also expect a lot of dry scientific prattle from people in lab coats about modernism and the dangers of superstition and so on. That’s just what you’re gonna get in these monster movies from the 1950s… wait a tick, this was released in fucking 1970??

            That must explain, if there is an explanation, why despite the pro forma setup, TROG is a very different movie than you might expect. For starters, we’re not going to be treated to just a few glimpses of our title character at the beginning and end. In fact, he’s going to be on-screen for basically the entire thing. It’s very possible that he gets more screen time than Joan Crawford. And as soon as we get a good look at him (which happens almost immediately) it becomes clear why Dr. Brockton thinks he might be such an important scientific find: he is, it turns out, basically just a normal human, wearing fuzzy boots and loin cloth, with an ape mask he never takes off the terrifying head of a prehistoric ape! He looks like an ape-minotaur. The fact that he’s obvious just some sporty Englishman (Joe Cornelius, who had been a pro wrestler under the name “The Dazzler”) wearing an impressive but clearly artificial mask,** and no effort whatsoever is being made to disguise this fact through lighting or editing, makes for a wonderfully bonkers sensation that stretches credibility until it firmly snaps back into camp. In fact, for much of the movie I couldn’t help wondering if this was somehow a clue that this was all a weird hoax, and Dr. Brockton would eventually realize that she’s locked up a English prep school lad who donned an ape mask in a prank that ended up getting out of control.

This is not a Halloween costume or something, this is an actual frame from the movie.

            Alas, that does not turn out to be the case, and this odd physiological specimen, once caught, ends up in Dr. Brockton’s lab for a rigorously scientific regimen of tests that hahaha, I’m kidding of course, instead she teaches it to enjoy classical music and play fetch. Seriously, for virtually the entire middle two acts, this thing is fucking Pygmalion*** with Joan Crawford trying to “civilize” a buff human body topped by an ape head fixed with a single perpetually antagonized expression. And it works! Trog doesn’t change expressions or seem especially eager about any of this, but he tolerates it and can be taught the basic principal of throwing a ball back and forth and what have you. Dr. Brockton seems thrilled by this, and even brings in a series of specialists who perform surgery allowing Trog to speak! Holy shit, science is fucking nuts. She seems right on the cusp of teaching him to sing opera or play cricket, which would surely win her the Nobel Prize.

            Wouldn’t you know it, though, those ignorant townsfolk don’t understand the, uh, sophisticated scientific precision of this approach, and want Trog put down. Dr. Brockton protests on the grounds that this is her apeman, and it would be a darn shame if he was euthanized before she can teach him to play bridge or whatever. Drawing from the rich tradition of criminal jurisprudence the British Empire was so known for, the local magistrate convenes some kind of unnamed court proceedings to figure the matter out, in the most punishingly dismal square gray concrete box England has ever produced. Holy shit, TROG turns into a tense courtroom drama!

            Unfortunately, despite Dr. Brockton’s strident legal defense winning over the judge, that dickhole Mr. Murdock is not going to accept the idea that he can’t murder an unbelievably ancient and unique physical specimen that can even talk (!) just because a judge says he can’t. In fact, he expresses his contempt for legal jurisprudence by sitting in the crowd and constantly shouting out his opinions during the trial, which the judge seems to accept as qualifying him to be the prosecuting attorney. Murdock doesn’t believe in this newfangled evolution hocus pocus that the PC liberals are always cramming down his throat, and is none too pleased that this evolutionary missing link basically proves it. With the impeccable logic we’ve come to expect from religious reactionaries, he reasons if he just kills it, that will solve the problem and God will reward him for changing reality to make the Bible true.

            (END SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH) Things do not go as planned, however, and Trog ends up killing Murdock and escaping to a small but satisfying rampage, which includes impaling a butcher on a meat hook and using his prehistoric strength to tip over a car (which immediately burns to ashes, killing the driver. I hold, however, that this death was really more on the car manufacturer than the rampaging apeman. Unsafe at any speed!). Even poor Dr. Brockman has to admit that this is too far, and so the military is roused to snuff out the poor brute. Because they are the military and he is just an athletic human wearing a loin cloth and an ape mask, this proves surprisingly easy, but at least he goes down in epic style, kinda a WHITE HEAT sorta ending (spoilers for WHITE HEAT). And then poor Dr. Brockton just sadly walks off, and the credits roll. No denouement, no epilogue, no lecture on what science could have learned if only people would be more tolerant of murderous unfrozen ape men, no sad speculation on how the world could have benefitted if he’d only had time to learn to ride a unicycle. Old movies used to understand you just wanted to see the cool part of the story and could figure the rest out for yourselves. And thus, the tragic tale of TROG ends, at a breezy 91 minutes with credits.

            Obviously I desperately wanted to see this movie since I first learned of its existence, and I’m happy to report it does not disappoint. It is, of course, completely ludicrous, but it’s both earnestly ludicrous and diversely ludicrous, with new layers of insanity introduced every time the movie threatens to get into a rut. Most importantly, the two marquee stars – Joan Crawford and Trog—are in the entire thing! You could hardly be called a hopeless cynic for suspecting they roped ol’ Joan Crawford (in her final film role) into two or three days of shooting by promising bottomless martinis so they could get her name on the poster, but no, she’s the main character, on-screen for practically every scene, probably only slightly drunk and still wildly charismatic enough for us to tear our eyes off the title character to watch her. And as silly as Trog looks with his big fake ape head, look, you paid to see a Trog here (and I did! I actually paid to see this!) and the movie delivers all the goddam Trog you can handle. Director Freddie Francis orchestrates this without much style or grace (too bad, since he started his career as a cinematographer, and his two Academy Awards in that field prove he’s capable of directing better-looking material) but who the fuck cares about that shit? You get to see Joan Crawford playing ball with an apeman. If that sounds good to you, TROG delivers. If that doesn’t sound good to you, I’m sorry that you know nothing of true happiness.

            In conclusion, TROG was released October 24, 1970. Alas, The Kinks’ immortal Apeman was released a month later, on November 20, 1970, so it couldn’t be in the movie. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way they should, but that shouldn’t stop you from using science to teach animals to play sports. At least they sing it in LINK.  

* Although I’m not sure how much this will help, since despite theorizing that Trog is a relic of the ice age frozen in a glacier until recently, Dr. Brockton’s words conjure a vivid image in her listeners’ minds of Trog co-existing with some amazingly well-animated stop-motion Dinosaurs. This turns out to be recycled footage which was produced by Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen for the 1956 Warner Bros. nature documentary THE ANIMAL WORLD. Not very scientifically accurate in my opinion, and also rather strange since she never mentions dinosaurs but does specifically mention Trog getting frozen in a glacier. And by the way, even that little theory seems pretty questionable. How recently, exactly, were there glaciers covering Berkshire? Even by the most generous numbers, this assumes Trog was unfrozen 16,000 years ago. No wonder he’s such a crotchety old grouch!

** IMDB and TCM both contain trivia sections claiming the mask is a leftover from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, which seems plausible even if I can’t confirm it.

*** Fine, MY FAIR LADY, you philistine.

 

What else can one say?

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	From The Boiling Rage Of A World Hurled Back One Million Years Comes… TROG. I honestly don’t understand what that means and question whether it’s even a sentence.
TITLE ACCURACY	100 fucking percent.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Creature Feature, Mad Science
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Joan Fucking Crawford!
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Michael Gough, Freddie Francis, and co-writer John Gilling
NUDITY?	No, although some strapping young men strip down to their underwear.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No, but Trog does have a dolly he’s fond of
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	No monster-vision here.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Science = teaching newfound animals how to be properly British.

Shakma

Shakma (1990) aka Panic in the Tower

Dir. Tom Logan

Written by Roger Engle

Starring Chris Atkins, Amanda Wyss, and… Roddy McDowall? Really?

I agree, this is an awesome poster. Do not be fooled. Also note the obvious greatness of the original tagline: "The World's most aggressive primate... just got mad."

Let’s be honest with each other. I don’t think either one of us expected this 1990 horror cheapie about a killer baboon on the loose inside a locked med school to be a good movie. This is not the sort of movie you make as a labor of love and struggle for for years to bring your uncompromising artistic vision of the baboon/med student relationship to the imploring eyes of the American public. This is the sort of movie you make because HBO has a hundred minute window available to fill next month, and you know a guy who owns a baboon. But don’t get me wrong, that’s a perfectly honorable reason to make a killer baboon pic; many movies I thoroughly enjoy have emerged from motives far more sordid, and there’s no reason a lack of artistic hubris should get in the way of making a perfectly delightful “When (insert whatever animal John Peters saw a National Geographic special about this week)’s attack” type of love letter to pure cinema. So ok, we don’t expect this to be a good movie. But it ought to at least be entertaining, which I’m sorry to report SHAKMA is not, at all.

By the time the movie establishes that its five or six principal characters are hip, sexy med students locked in an abandoned building to play some sort of stunning lame Live Action Role-Play game, you are already starting to identify with that guy from 127 HOURS, and coming to a similar conclusion about whether it’s worth it to gnaw off a major appendage. Things start to briefly look up for a little bit with the introduction of the title character, who has immensely greater screen presence* than any of these clowns, and with the fact that the most annoying character dies pretty early on in a pretty wonderful way. Faced with the wrath of a rampaging baboon, he does the only logical thing you could do in this situation, which is to sneak into a supply closet and grab a beaker of acid to throw at his pint-sized attacker. I’ll let you guess which one of the two of them ends up with his face burned off, and which one goes on to continue to be a rampaging baboon. But it’s pretty funny, and ever so fleeting stirs hopes that this might at least be an entertaining terrible movie.  

Expect to see this hallway a lot.

Alas, absolutely nothing remotely interesting whatsoever happens for the remainder of the punishing 100 minute runtime. I like Shakma, and I appreciate that his (her?) performance seems to be mostly real baboon, with maybe 10% decent baboon puppet mixed in there**. But the poor little bastard doesn’t get anything interesting to do, and the ratio of interminably uneventful scenes of these LARPing fuckwads slowly walking down identical hallways to scenes of Shakma jumping on their faces is disastrously high in the wrong direction. In a better movie than this (a much, much, vastly better movie) I might applaud the director for milking the suspense, but listen dude, you’re not directing A HAUNTING, this is fucking SHAKMA. We’re not sitting there in rapt suspense while these interchangeable asstards walk slowly down the same well-lit atmosphere-free school hallway over and over for what must about 80% of the movie. Instead we’re praying for Shakma to unexpectedly attack the guy behind the camera and put an end to this in the only possible dignified way.

This is about the most that Shakma can manage, but you gotta admit, he really gives it his all.

Alas, no such luck; the 20% of scenes that do not involve slowly walking down the same hallway are all either a) LARPing, b) Roddy McDowell looking confused and disoriented about how he got here and why these people won’t let him leave or c) Shakma flipping the fuck out and hurling his tiny body against a closed door like a killer fraggle on PCP, while on the other side of the door some cracker fucko screams and frantically holds onto the doorknob, which is an odd decision because in no way, shape or form does Shakma appear to be capable of (or interested in) manipulating a doorknob. That’s it, that’s all you get, I just described the entire movie. Despite the consistent 20 or so emotions that remain fixed on Chris Atkins’ face at all times, the movie is a barren wasteland of the soul with occasional footage of a baboon***. Except for the acid guy, everyone dies the same way and all off-screen. And frankly, Shakma is an angry little guy, but is also maybe two foot high. If a two-foot high primate can manage to kill you, well, you didn’t really want to live very badly anyway, did you? I’m sorry but that’s on you.

Obviously, you’re gonna have to sort of love that adorable fuzzball Shakma, and as a star-making vanity piece I guess it is slightly more eventful than 8 MILE. But seriously guys, a movie about a killer baboon deserves to be better than this.

    

*I was going to say “charisma” but I don’t want to encourage these LARPing fucktards.

**By the way, “Shakma” comes from “Chacma” Baboons (Papio Ursinus) a species native to Southern Africa. I know my readers expect me to go deep, so that’s your morsel of hard-nosed journalism for today.

***I guess some people online seem to sort of enjoy how ridiculous and incompetent this is, but man, you'd have to trim 40 minutes off the runtime for it to be worth it in terms of so-bad-it's-good payoff. At 100 minutes it just turns into a slog, even with friends and copious amounts of alcohol.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!

• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Yeah, no.
• SEQUEL: None
• REMAKE: Nope
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? No, but Roddy McDowell is kinda a coup for something this low-rent.
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: None.
• BOOBIES: No
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: None
• ENTRAILS? No
• CULTISTS: No
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: No
• SLASHERS: No
• CURSES: No
• (UNCANNY) VALLEY OF THE DOLLS? No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: High. It has a theatrical poster, but did this really play in theaters? I have serious doubts. "Box Office Shakma" reveal no hits, although IMBD does laughably try to claim its budget was 1.5 million instead of 30 dollars and a bus ride home for Roddy McDowell.
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A