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.