The Frogs Are Coming....They're Already Here!! by Mr. Miller

Let's take a trip back to the wild, untamed killer animal movies of the bygone era - the 70's...

FROGS (1972) What if nature - the birds, the lizards, the frogs - waged a war? And what if man were it’s enemy? And what if humankind were to lose that war?

If there is one thing you will hear me say over and over is that the 70’s was the best era for film EVER. Forget all the computer graphic-bloated story-deprived over-budgeted blockbusters of today - and trust me, you’ll forget them soon enough - they are simply fodder for producers fantasies. The 70’s were such a volatile time politically and culturally that even horror movies were ripe with sociopolitical agenda.

Consider the sub-genre of the nature revenge films like: The Day of the Animals; Willard; Food of the Gods; Sssssss! Squirm, Piranha, and of course Frogs (there were a glut of similar paperback novels as well). All of these films had themes of man tampering with nature, be it through chemical experimentation, or pollution, and then ultimately paying the price for what he’d done. They also reflected how we Americans had gotten so comfy with our Jetson’s style easy instant living that we never took the time to look around and see what it was doing to the environment, until it was seemingly too late.

Ray Milland plays the stubbornly old wheelchair bound multi-millionaire brat, who just so happens to be the personification of the evil side of man. His factories have made him a wealthy man without a spot of guilt over all the pollutants they pump into the air and water. The one thing that he hates, though, is frogs, and he dispatches his grounds keepers to rid his island paradise of them by using toxic sprays. He wants his island to be a place of relaxation, a place of safety. Boy is he in for a surprise.

The miserable old codger surrounds himself with family members so needy for attention, and a cut of his fortunes, that they will endure the old patriarch’s condescending insults, and an almost childish need for a Fourth of July slash birthday party extravaganza complete with fireworks and birthday music.

Then comes the good stranger to the lands. Sam Elliot is a freelance photographer doing a pictorial for an eco-magazine on the polluted swamp lands that surround the old mans island. Ironically his simple canoe that he tours the swamps in is capsized by a sooped up modern motorboat, driven by one of the old mans drunken kin. Joan Van Ark (whose bizarrely tiny outfits seem to have come from a toddler’s clothing store), is also on board the gas guzzling motorboat. She makes eyes with the photographer and apologizes for her brother’s antics, inviting the waterlogged Elliot to dry off at the mansion.

It soon becomes evident that something is not right on the island. The guests complain that the incessant croaking of the frogs is driving them mad from lack of sleep. But they don’t know the half of it. All sorts of creepy crawling creatures, snakes, crocs, bugs, frogs seem to be squirming about in the underbrush, and are slowly slithering their way towards the mansion with an apparent agenda. It’s not long before the victims start croaking themselves (sorry!).

The director, George McCowan, fills this movie with moments of quiet suspense. There are no leaping frogs that decapitate young nubile victims. There are no thrashing alligators that roar and leap out of water with amazing dexterity. Instead McCowan trains the camera on the steady movement of the creatures, as they slowly advance on their unsuspecting prey. The “attack” scenes are hushed and unhurried, even the screams of the suffering victims are silenced. One particularly excruciating scene has a man slowly and methodically being covered with yards and yards of spider webs as dozens of spiders scamper over him. Eech!

What the director should mostly be rewarded for, though, is his use of REAL creatures. Seeing all those real frogs and spiders and gators does make your skin crawl. No contemporary film that I know of, with all it’s CGI wonderments, could ever pull off such creepiness.

For the sake of comparison and argument, let’s take one of the first attack scenes. A young man goes to fetch some orchids from the island’s hothouse, where, unbeknownst to him, his murder is being planned by a group of lizards and other reptiles. As the man gathers his flowers a large iguana-looking thing slowly pulls the door shut with its tale, and the other lizards and snakes slither about between some of the bottles of chemicals, crashing them to the floor and releasing their noxious gases. The man is oblivious to the elaborate scheme and thinks nothing of it until he reaches the jammed up door. More bottles are overturned. The hothouse fills with fumes, and soon the man is overcome and dies a horrible suffocating death.

The scene runs about 2 minutes and was probably shot in less than half a day for the cost of well under $5000.

Flash forward to modern day Hollywood. The movie’s cast is bloated with the hippest young stars who head to an island for an all night rave. Little do they know that the class nerd that they always pick on has developed a genetic code on his new IMac that will turn all the frogs into super-strong beings that will do his bidding. Freddie Prinze Jr. heads to the hothouse to raid the marijuana plants and soon is trapped by the reptiles that leap out and swat at him with their mighty tails.

First they’re going to need a team of animatronics experts to design and build each lizard and frog in the scene so that it can properly knock over the bottles without looking too fake. Then a CGI team will have to match the puppets with a computerized counterpart for the wide full body action scenes. Then another CGI team will have to match the backgrounds to the action so the reptiles will look insanley realistic. Then a foley team will replicate the sound of breaking bottles by utilizing a bag of potato chips, light bulbs, and chopstix. And then yet another CGI team will have to develop, and patent, a computer program that will simulate the rising gaseous fumes. A special FX make-up guru will be called in to design the bubbling face make-up for his team to apply and run with multiple remote controls. And another team of CGI artists will add in the eye popping, blood spurting FX’s.

Number of days to do this 2 minute scene: about one month. The cost will go upwards to about a million bucks. Oh! That would include the part where the animatronic frog turns to the camera and winks and says in Robin Williams voice, “It’s not nice to fool with mother nature”.

I guess that is really frightening, now that I think about it.

Back at the mansion…..

As Elliot and Van Ark try to escape, Milland is steadfast and stubborn, refusing to believe that his island paradise is under attack. “I still believe man is the master of the world,” he argues. He is made to swallow those words as the climax of the film pits him against…..well, you’ll just have to watch it.

I realize that all this plotting sounds pretty basic, and it is. The story is nothing wildly imaginative, or groundbreaking. But the script by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees weaves together the paranoia and the guilt of the times so well that you can almost imagine that all this nature revenge stuff could really happen. It creeped me out the very first time I saw it as a double bill with Willard, and it still made my skin crawl when I watched it for second time just recently.

Frogs is on video, and DVD. An extra on the DVD is the original theatrical trailer, which shows a cool quicksand death scene that never made it into the actual movie.

It’ll make your skin crawl!

Copyright 2002