Frogs

Frogs (1972)

Dir. George McCowan

Written by Robert Hutchinson, Robert Blees

Starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Judy Pace, Adam Roarke,

FROGS opens with minutes on end of a hunky gentleman in a canoe (Sam Elliott, who you will not recognize without his trademark mustache for a good half-hour or so) floating around a Southern waterway and doing some leisurely nature photography. This is an entirely appropriate beginning, because it’s also more or less the movie’s plan for the next 90 minutes of your life. FROGS, you see, is comprised of two things, in an approximately 50-50 split: footage of a bunch of annoying people sitting around a Florida panhandle manor house, and footage of frogs just kind of sitting there, looking pretty happy to finally graduate from extra to featured player. Why someone thought this would make for a good horror movie --or a horror movie at all-- is never even remotely clear. But if you like footage of frogs, this is the movie you’ve been waiting for your whole life.

Sam Elliott (THE LEGACY, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) plays Detective John Frogs, a freelance photographer doing some hard-nosed digging into the seedy underbelly of amphibian life in sleepy Southern waterways. It must be pretty important work because the first thing he does when he gets back to civilization is run to call his editor, presumably to tell him to hold the presses. Unfortunately, this journalistic juggernaut is thwarted when a speedboat driven by Clint (Adam Roarke, DIRTY MARY CRAZY LARRY) swamps the canoe. Clint is a drunken rich-kid fuckup, but his sister Karen (Joan Van Ark, The Young and the Restless) --also on board-- is pretty nice and decides pretty quickly she’d like to bone the rugged young photojournalist, so she insists they fish him out of the water and bring him back to their family’s palatial manor house to dry off and then for some reason to stay for a few days.

Once there, Elliott quickly meets the family patriarch, wheelchair-bound Jason Crockett (Academy-Award-Winner Ray Milland, THE PYJAMA GIRL GASE, THE LOST WEEKEND), a grouchy old tyrant who is very fucking insistent that nothing ruin his birthday party tomorrow, not even a bunch of Frogs. For the next forty or so minutes Elliott just walks around the grounds of the house meeting every single relative and individually re-explaining why he’s there, while sometimes the camera cuts to footage of frogs. Pretty gripping stuff.

At about 45 minutes, we’ve had a lot of talking and a lot of footage of frogs, plus a good bit of footage of snakes, a sprinkling of geckos, a couple monitor lizards, and a little bit of alligator. But no actual scary parts. Elliott does find the deceased body of one of Crockett’s workers out in the woods, but he died off-screen before the events of the movie and nobody seems too surprised since, yeah, there’s snakes and stuff out there. Fair to say, then, that there’s not a lot of drama and absolutely no horror during the film’s first half, although in fairness the movie’s title promised FROGS, and frogs it delivers, dammit, and none too stingily. Finally, at 45 minutes, one of the hundreds of indistinguishable obnoxious people squatting at the house wanders out into the woods, where you know he’s gonna get what’s coming to him (and all humans). But even so, he as to accidentally shoot himself in the leg before nature can finish the job. Eventually, some other people die in some prolonged but fairly uneventful death sequences mixed with nature footage. But because FROGS doesn’t have a lot of animatronics or anything, the victims really have to do most of the legwork themselves. Another guy is standing in a greenhouse when lizards knock poisonous chemicals off the shelves and he asphyxiates instead of walking the four steps to the greenhouse door. Man, nature must really be kicking itself for not trying this sooner, who knew these guys went down so easy?  

One thing you’ll notice, though, is that even once people start dying, the cutaways to frogs continue. Which is odd, because while people are killed by monitor lizards, snakes, alligators, snapping turtles, and mostly their own stupidity, I note that the frogs never actually do anything. I don’t know if they’re the masterminds behind all of this, or if they’re just nature’s cowards and they’re not gonna take action til they can see which side is winning, or what. But it strikes me as strange that in a movie called FROGS, which features almost wall-to-wall footage of frogs, and boasts a poster with a human hand dangling from a frog’s mouth, the frogs just kind of sit there. Although Mr. Majestyk offers an interesting interpretation:

Anyway, regardless of whether anyone does or not get devoured by frogs (they don’t), FROGS may accidentally be the perfect movie for our times. For one thing, it’s terrible, just like our times. But for another, I think it may be  --maybe even intentionally!-- a metaphor for the inexorable changing cultural landscape and the bitter resistance some people put up against that change. The frogs never actually DO anything, but they’re the harbingers of what’s to come: they’re getting louder and louder, more numerous and brazen, harder to ignore, until the smart people finally acknowledge that a course correction is necessary. Those who refuse to take heed of their inability to control the world are gonna wind up in trouble. Seen in that light, there’s a lot of interesting subtext going on here with the various stock characters.

I mean, think about it -- you got Milland as the cranky, bullying family patriarch holed up in the gargantuan home he insists his family has lived in for generations. The only thing he cares about is ensuring things never change, that whatever happens, his birthday party does not deviate from the same routine he’s demanded his entire life. Oh, and when is that birthday? Why, on the Fourth of July! And lest you forget it, they have footage of frogs defiling his large American-Flag birthday cake, while he broods in his wheelchair, listening to patriotic music on a turntable. His single-minded insistence that they not budge a single inch from the routine that they’ve undertaken every year, without fail, is really the only conflict in the movie, which seems completely laughable unless you start to consider its potential for allegory.

I mean, is it too much to wonder if he represents the Old South (which was a little less old in 1972)? He’s a dithering, hectoring old bully, crippled and bitter, fixated on ensuring that everyone respects his unquestioned authority and dutifully goes through the same comfortingly familiar motions they’ve always gone through. But times are changing. One of his grandkids has a glamorous black girlfriend (Judy Pace, BRIAN’S SONG), and the awkwardness of her being a guest at this aristocratic Southern plantation hangs so heavy in the air that it doesn’t even have to be spoken. In fact, everyone fastidiously avoids speaking it; listing the reasons she’d be objectionable to grandpa, her fiance carefully avoids mentioning race at all, instead landing (lamely) on her being a “fashion model.” You can almost see him consider stating the obvious and then chickening out. She chickens out herself, albeit in a somewhat sweeter way, in a surprisingly nuanced scene between her and Crockett’s older, black maid (blues singer Mae Mercer, DIRTY HARRY, THE BEGUILED). Neither one of them needs to state the strangeness of their shared racial past and their radically different present, but the maid notices they have the same name -- Maybelle -- though her younger namesake goes by “Bella.” They share an odd moment of fractured, awkward kinship which feels unusually honest for a film (ostensibly) about killer frogs.

Are their different versions of the same name a sign that Bella is fooling herself in thinking she’ll ever be accepted in this world which almost certainly consigned Maybelle and her ancestors to humiliating servitude? Or is it a hopeful symbol that Bella could rebrand herself and sit as an equal with these backwards old crackers, who are surely deeply put off by her very presence, but are too scared to say something to a social equal (or better)? I don’t know, exactly, but it’s nice that the movie finds time for that ambiguity in-between shots of frogs. Towards the end, when Crockett’s black maid and butler (Lance Taylor, Sr, BLACULA) meekly ask if they can leave before they get killed by frogs or what have you, Bella finally makes the racial tension explicit: “Maybe you haven’t heard about it stuck out here in vacation land,” she snaps --and it’s hard to say if she’s addressing Crockett or his employees -- “but five score and seven years ago, they just started letting people make up their own minds.” When they do go, Crockett isn’t just angry, he seems genuinely hurt, even though they’re almost absurdly accommodating of the old bastard, and even seem touchingly concerned about his welfare. But concern isn’t what Crockett wants. Loyalty, he says, is -- but to him that just means unquestioned obedience.

He demands that obedience from both his hired staff and from his family. “He knows he’s not popular. With the public or his family. And he revels in it,” says one of his grandkids. But they play along, bored and annoyed, because they’re afraid that if they rock the boat they’ll lose their share of his wealth. If Crockett is indeed a metaphor for the Strom Thurmonds of the world, it’s an interesting perspective to cast his “kids” (the younger generation) as uninterested in his antics and priorities, but dutifully following them for their own selfish reasons. And of course, money is a big part of this; even though he’s just a single, crippled old man, Crockett can make everyone dance to his tune because he controls the money. It may not be earned, but that doesn’t mean his descendants fancy the idea of losing any of it. “You make us sound like the worst of the ugly rich,” one of his kids admonishes. “We ARE the ugly rich!” he replies, to which she explains, “We’re entitled to be ugly... God knows we pay enough in taxes.” Man, some things never change, huh? Which is particularly galling because FROGS is very much a movie which believes things have changed; which sees the grouchy old Crocketts of the world as the thing holding us back. Unfortunately it’s now 2017, and we just have new Crocketts to replace the old ones, and a lot of them are probably the same kids who just mechanically went through the motions to appease their bossy old grandpa, but who now cling to the same old bullshit as if they made it up. I guess with the benefit of hindsight it’s not so simple. But still, I appreciate the optimism of FROGS’s view that the Old Ways will get swept away whether they’re willing to acknowledge it or not, that the changing world is inevitable, overwhelming, a force of nature.

Of course, it’s also literally a force of nature here, which makes for a somewhat confused metaphor. On the surface, FROGS is very much a quintessential “Nature strikes back” movie, right down to the required scene where a character comes right out and speculates aloud about nature taking revenge. Hell, it opens with a potential motive for nature: Elliott photographs a bunch of garbage along with a bunch of frogs during the credits (in a perfect summation of what the filmmakers intend to do). But I think this is tied to the filmmakers' point, too; nature is one of those things -- like shifting racial, social and sexual mores-- which isn’t just going to politely sit there waiting for Ray Milland to come around. It’s gonna change, and you can either change with it or get trampled by it. You can try to ignore the growing chorus of frogs making a racket in the background, you can even try to kill them off. But in the end, who’s lying dead on the floor next to his overturned wheelchair, and who’s smugly hopping around on his corpse? I won’t say because I don’t want to spoil anything but after you watch the movie I think you will understand what I mean.

All this is kinda getting away from the fact that this is a ridiculous and terrible movie, which is pretty hard to deny. The acting isn’t a disaster, though; Elliott has a confident, reserved cool which makes his non-character seem compelling, and Milland is making at least a small amount of effort, or anyway more than one would expect from one of these late-career roles from former A-listers where they play a character in a wheelchair so they don’t have to stand up while shooting. But aside from some pretty nature photography (rendered in glorious blu-ray in the most recent Scream Factory! release) there’s not really much entertainment value to be had here. It’s not even really outrageous enough to be enjoyably campy, it’s just pretty dull (unless you suffer from a particular phobia of the fauna of Northern Florida wetlands, in which case this is probably far too horrifying for you to enjoy anyway).

Still, its little allegorical touches are interesting enough that it’s not a total wash, especially given the film’s ambiguous apocalyptic implication -- is this happening everywhere? “I still believe man is master of this world” Milland says. “Does that mean he can’t live in harmony with the rest of it?” Elliott returns. A pretty bold subtext for a schlocky killer frog lizard movie. Maybe someday, someone will make a good one. Until then, the best I can offer is the suggestion that you stick to the end of the credits to finally see an (inexplicably animated) frog actually eat someone. It’s not easy being green.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

ALIAS	Released mostly just as “FROGS” in various languages, though the West German title helpfully explains, “Frogs - Killer aus dem Sumpf” ie, “FROGS: KILLERS FROM THE SWAMP.” You know, in case you didn’t know where frogs come from.
TAGLINE	Today The Pond… Tomorrow The World! Which is inaccurate in two ways, first of all since the movie implies that they are probably taking over the world today, and also because it makes the movie seem much more funny and self-aware than it actually is.
TITLE ACCURACY	One of the most accurate titles in history.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	No
REMAKE?	None, alas
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	When Animals Attack!
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Ray Milland; Elliott was not yet famous (and only 28 at the time) but in retrospect he definitely counts. Incidentally, his shirtless scenes here earned him his subsequent role in LIFEGUARD, so at least you got that waiting for you.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Milland probably did enough horror films to count, although I’m sure he’d prefer to be remembered for his actual good films.
NUDITY?	Just the frogs, though Elliott does have a couple beefcake topless scenes
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Oh mercy yes
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	I think all that frog footage is definitely supposed to make us think the frogs are always watching us.
MORAL OF THE STORY	That swamp that Kermit was in at the beginning of THE MUPPET MOVIE was way more hardcore than "The Rainbow Connection" lets on.

The Beast in The Cellar

The Beast in The Cellar (1970)

Dir and written by James Kelly

Starring Beryl Reid, Flora Robson, John Hamill, T. P. McKenna

Yeah, none of this is in the movie. And I don't know who those two young ladies in the corner are but they're definitely not our protagonists.

What we got here is a dishwater-dull entry into the “crazed-cannibal in the cellar” genre. Except without the part where the crazed cannibal does anything. There are a handful --maybe four or five at the very most-- of brief POV stalking scenes, which end abruptly with either A) a scream and a quick edit or B) completely indecipherable closeups and rapid editing of some kind of injury occurring, but completely obscuring precisely what is happening or what is causing it. This takes up maybe a generous 5-7 minutes of screentime total, and that’s all the crazed cannibal action you’re going to get. You should know that up front. This is not a movie with any good stuff in it. I already had my suspicions when I noticed it was a Tigon Production; as we all know, as far as British schlock studios go, Tigon was the poor man’s Amicus Productions, and Amicus was the poor man’s Hammer Productions, and Hammer was the poor man’s “a real film studio,” so this is pretty far down the line. Tigon did manage to produce a small handful of low-budget winners in the late 60’s and early 70’s (WITCHFINDER GENERAL, BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW) but the words “from the studio which brought you THE BLOOD BEAST TERROR” do not exactly inspire confidence that they’re working overly hard to entertain.

So yes, there IS a beast, of sorts, in the cellar. But the vast, vast majority of the movie is actually a two-person familial drama about two elderly sisters (Beryl Reid, THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU, THE DOCTOR AND THE DEVILS, and Flora Robson, BLACK NARCISSUS, CLASH OF THE TITANS) who drink tea and talk in a polite, roundabout way about how they fear someone or something they keep locked in the cellar may have been getting out and causing murders. That’s a solid 80% of the movie, right there. While there’s something kind of endearing about a exploitation genre movie which is almost entirely devoted to two older ladies drinking tea and elliptically speaking around any specific details about their past, it’s also absolutely unbearably dull going. I mean, Reid and Robson are both fine actresses, but this is not exactly gripping dialogue here. One scene finds a visiting soldier (John Hamill, the fantastic-sounding THE OVER-AMOROUS ARTIST) recounting, in almost word-for-word, beat-by-beat detail, every single moment from a scene that the audience watched in full not five minutes prior. He returns maybe five more times to similarly gripping results, and to have a baffling nonromance with a pretty young nurse (Tessa Wyatt, ENGLAND MADE ME)  who keeps being brought back into the story as if she’s eventually going to be important, but never turns out to be.

The explanation as to who or what is locked in the cellar doesn’t arrive until the very end, when one of the old ladies, more or less unprompted, relates what turns out to be a meandering, multi-generational family history in such a long-winded way that it appears day turns to night and even the police inspector learning the truth behind the sudden increase in mutilated corpses appearing in his district looks like he can barely keep his eyes open. Which would make sense, because of all the possible reasons to have a beast in the cellar you could possibly imagine, this has to be the single most uninteresting one the mind could devise. I’d spoil it for you but there’s not really a twist or anything to spoil, given that the explanation manages the amazing feat of being both utterly nonsensical and staggeringly boring. It does involve both World Wars, and the physical and psychological toll they took on those who fought in them, which sort of begs you to read this as some sort of allegory, but if that’s how it is intended it would take a more sophisticated scholar of wartime British history than I to parse it. If you’d like to try your hand at wrestling some meaning out of it, here are the pieces you’ve got to work with, boiled down from what seems like 90 minutes of exposition to four basic points (SPOILERS, obviously, not that this is really interesting enough to be spoiled):

1: The sisters are really into their Dad, and keep talking about how great and handsome he was to an uncomfortable degree, and I really assumed the “beast” was going to be the result of some sort of repressed incest incident. But nope. Instead: (SPOILERS CONTINUE)

2: Dad Went off to WWI, and they thought he had died. But then he came back but was physically and psychologically scarred and really kind of an asshole thereafter. But not enough so that they had to lock him up or anything, so he’s not the beast in the cellar. Just a dick. (SPOILERS CONTINUE)

3: They also had a younger brother, who for some reason Dad never liked. They really stress this point but it doesn’t matter because then Dad died of old age, and that was the end of that. Good thing we know his whole fucking life story now. (SPOILERS CONTINUE)

4: Then World War II came along, and, remembering the bad times their Dad experienced after the first World War, the sisters decided they didn’t want their brother to join the army, and figured it would be a better idea to just wall him up in the basement until he became a mindless cannibal. So they did. And that’s the story of the Beast In The Cellar. (END SPOILERS)

Obviously that feels like it should have some kind of subtextual interpretation about war, but whatever it’s supposed to be I can’t figure it out. Obviously war is bad, but maybe the point is that trying to prevent people from going to war is even worse? But even if that’s what the movie’s getting at, what real-world parallel does that have? The only thing I could come up with is maybe some kind of rebuke to Chamberlain and the pre-WWII Nazi appeasement crowd. But was there really much point in criticizing Chamberlain by fucking 1970? And even if there was, I don’t see how the actual Beast In The Cellar fits into that metaphor. What, Nazi appeasement turned the nation’s potential fighting force into insane, isolated cannibals? I don’t get it. Even at my most generous interpretation, it’s as shitty a metaphor as it is a movie, and it's 30 years too late to be relevant or even bold. Subtext rejected.

Anyway.

The movie briefly shows some flickers of life halfway through when one of the two old ladies has to try and cover things up by disposing of an inconvenient corpse with its eyeball hanging out. You don’t get to see too many horror movies where a polite old British lady has to awkwardly drag a mutilated corpse around, and I approve. But that’s only one scene and it’s indifferently executed. There are essentially no other entertaining scenes of any kind. A total anticlimax of an ending definitively puts the nail in the coffin, and firmly establishes this one as aggressive anti-entertainment, though kudos to the composer Tony Macaulay for really, really working hard to try and sell us on the idea that any of this is interesting. I mean, it’s a big, rich dramatic score which is almost laughable in the face of how boring the actual story is, but you gotta respect the guy for trying. Fortunately he had a day job to fall back on: he was a songwriter for what looks to be half of the big hits of the 60s, including Build Me Up Buttercup (performed by The Foundations) and Don’t Give Up On Us (performed by David Soul) as well as singles for Donna Summers, The 5th Dimension, Andy Williams, Scott Walker, and others. I can neither confirm nor deny that Build Me Up Buttercup is loosely based on the plot of THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR, but it would make about as much sense as anything else in this turkey.

I didn't think it was possible, but this French poster is even more misleading than the British one. And the "beast" is definitively NOT "Moitie Humain, molitie Animal... 100% Terrorisant!"  that is just a filthy French lie.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

TAGLINE	A Chill-Filled Festival of Horror! -- a blatant lie if I ever heard one, unless you find old ladies drinking tea and talking evasively about their childhood to be in any way “Chill-filled” a “festival” or a “horror.”
TITLE ACCURACY	It’s not a beast, I guess there is a cellar, though.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	UK
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Cannibal killer (basement-dwelling variety) / Maniac. I guess in the loosest possible sense also Slasher, since we do get some stalking and killing scenes peppered in there occasionally.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Definitely
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Yes, we get a beast-in-the-cellar POV
MORAL OF THE STORY	“Don’t lock people up in the basement until they go insane because you fear that going to war will have a negative impact on their psyche.” Really though, the real moral is we definitely need more horror movies starring nice old ladies. But they need to be a lot better than this.