FANTASIA OBSCURA: Sam Elliott Battles an Attack of Killer… Frogs?!
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, credit just seems to go not where it’s due, but where it’s wont, no matter what…
Frogs (1972)
Distributed by: American International
Directed by: George McCowan
It seems every holiday has to have one, some piece of ephemera popping up around the edge we could have done without.
With Christmas, we get “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” For Halloween, we get the ever-renewing “sexy costume” crisis. Lately, we’ve been “treated” to green Mardi Gras beads for St. Patrick’s Day to go around the necks of drinkers. And every damn Thanksgiving, we have to watch the Cowboys play.
So of course for Earth Day, we have this ready to go:
As we watch under the credits, we see Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) paddling in a canoe through the Florida swamps and occasionally pulling out his camera. He takes shots of the local fauna, as well as shots of the sewage pouring into the water and trash gathering in the eddies, probably thankful he’s in a canoe and not in the water…
…until he gets swamped by a speedboat, with the owner of the boat Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke) trying to make up for his BWI by taking Clint to dry land, the island in the middle of the swamp owned by his family. Clint’s sister Karen (Joan Van Ark) is all for making it up to poor Pickett, especially as we watch her slowly throughout the film eyeing the man intently, wanting to take this photographer into a dark room to see what develops, ifyouknowwhatImean…
Ends up Pickett found himself on the island at a great time: It’s nearly the Fourth of July, and Crockett family patriarch Jason (Ray Milland) is gearing up for his annual celebration of the holiday, which is also his birthday. He works everyone to death to get the most out of his double holiday, holding sway over folks with an iron grip with his sharp tongue and implied threats that he could write any of them out of inheriting his vast fortune.
On the guest list for this double holiday are the “ugly rich” as Jason puts it that make up the Crockett clan. Among the others attending, in addition to Karen, who’s relatively normal, and Clint, the ex-high school football star with anger issues, there’s Jason’s older sister Iris (Hollis Irving), who’s a little out of touch but can’t help noting her displeasure at the costs incurred when the family factories have to comply with environmental rules, and her husband Michael (David Gilliam) who harasses his son to be more like the rest of the family. Their son Kenneth (Nicholas Courtland), however, is so anxious to do the opposite that he brings to the island for the party his girlfriend Bella (Judy Pace), an act that is sadly not that much better accepted today among the “ugly rich” than it was in 1972.
So intent is the wheelchair-bound birthday boy to have his double holidays that he’s sent one of his helpers to spray every inch of the island with DDT to keep the frogs from croaking incessantly. To repay Jason’s hospitality, Pickett volunteers to look for him when he doesn’t come back in a timely manner.
Out in the wilds, he finds the poison-placing peon dead from multiple snake bites. As a nature photographer, Pickett realizes that this is, well, un-natural, and gives his host warnings about what he found, which Jason promptly decides to keep from everyone else because he wants his damned birthday as he’s has every year, and he’s not budging in the face of danger to give up his good time!
(Insert “Florida Man” joke here…)
Soon, the rest of the Southern family with all their neuroses get denied the chance to have a traditional Tennessee Williams-esque set of hardships, instead falling victims to snakes, spiders, leeches, lizards, alligators, all sorts of horrible deaths as the animals of the swamp rise up to-
Wait, hold on a sec: Notice anything…?
Look at how we lose most of these human cast members, only some of which rise slightly to a level of passing interest, save for Milland who layers it on thick well, and Elliott in his first film lead where he takes what he has from the script and works very well with it (enough that he doesn’t need to keep taking off his shirt a lot, though if you got it…). All of these people, dying at the hands of the animals, in a semi-graphic and not entirely believable manner.
The deaths they go through, all carried out by snakes, spiders, leeches, lizards, alligators… but not the frogs themselves? They get top billing in the film’s title, and they just… watch this go on?
The charitable might want to believe that the frogs are somehow commanding the other swamp critters, giving them tactics to take on the humans. Which is never explained how they got their position; at least in Phase IV they pretended that there was something that made the ants smart enough to want to come after us. But hey, if you want to just go with the idea that the frogs are in charge, and accept wholeheartedly that some animals are, indeed, more equal than others, then why not?
Except… Okay, take a look at these shots, representative of many found throughout the film of the frogs overseeing mayhem:
Go on, take a good look. Use Google if you think it’ll help; we’ll wait…
Okay, did you see it? All these frogs commanding the critters to cause crisis…
These. Are. All. Toads!
Yes, it does make a difference in the end! But more to the point, this movie about nature run amuck is even more badly named than you thought. We don’t see any Neobatrachiae actually try and kill someone themselves until late in the film, which has troubled many viewers over the years, but the fact that the titular amphibians are barely in the film save for a few shots where the animal wrangler didn’t keep them off the set just really takes it.
This proved to be one of the worst films trying to deliver a message about pollution and ecology ever made. Better the script and production, despite being a major positive for Sam Elliott’s career, had found a landfill to be sent to while waiting to become an EPA Superfund site.
Or at least they could have just called this film Fauna, which would have avoided a whole lot of aggravation…
NEXT TIME: We look at that film that was the culmination of all those solo movies leading to this massive team-up, the one that didn’t get made by Marvel…
