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It’s a legitimate question to ask who had the bigger fall from grace, Ray Milland or Joan Crawford. Before sliding into a number of television appearances, Milland appeared in both Frogs and The Thing with Two Heads in 1972. Joan Crawford’s storied film career ended with her starring role in Trog, playing an anthropologist who tries to connect with a cave-dwelling troglodyte. I think this is a competition that could go either way. I bring it up only because I watched Frogs today, and it’s something truly unlike anything I expected. The be fair, I had no idea what to expect.
Amazingly movie-named Pickett Smith (an un-mustachioed Sam Elliott) is a wildlife photographer taking pictures around an unnamed island in an unnamed (but clearly Southern) part of the country. He discovers a significant amount of evidence indicating pollution probably stemming from their use on the island plantation owned by the Crockett family. His canoe is swamped by Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke) and his sister Karen (Joan Van Ark). As a sort of reparation, they bring him to the family home where a celebration is soon to be taking place.
That celebration is for the birthdays of four Crockett family members, including the family patriarch, Jason (Milland). Unfortunately, what is about to happen is a terrible confluence of Jason being an immovable object knocking against the unstoppable force of nature that is about to strike the island.
Frogs basically has three types of scenes. The first scene consists of the various people at this celebration wondering where everyone else is. This is especially true of Jason, who spends the bulk of the movie angry that people aren’t precisely on time for the events that he has planned. But we’re here to see people get killed by frogs.
Except that we really, really don’t. Frogs instead features its second type of scene, which consists of people being killed by a variety of non-frog critters. These will include alligators, water moccasins, rattlesnakes, leeches, tarantulas, snapping turtles and more, but until the very end of the film, it will not include the title creatures.
The third type of scene consists of frogs croaking and hopping around, and presumably trying to look as menacing as possible.
Frogs is yet another in the long line of “nature goes berserk” movies of this era. The beginnings of the environmental movement featured a handful of film directors who decided that the best way to show environmental damage was to have some part of that environment rise up and try to kill us. And so, we get movies like this one, along with Food of the Gods, Phase IV, The Prophecy, and Squirm. People are bad and arrogant, the films tell us, and nature is going to retaliate.
And that’s really the whole movie. Despite there being obvious danger from nature all around them, The people in the film are going to wander off on their own (or, at the end in a group) and get fatally attacked by some pissed off creepy-crawlies. Through all of this, Jason Crockett insists that no one should leave and that his birthday is going to be celebrated no matter what and on schedule. This happens even when the body of one of his grandsons is discovered in the greenhouse after he asphyxiates when some lizards knock over a bottle labelled “poison” while he is cutting some flowers.
Frogs is dumb on a lot of fronts. Justin Crockett is a complete idiot and everyone is justified in wondering why he’s so insistent on celebrating his birthday when people are dying around him. The Crockett family is made up of idiots who more or less go out looking for new ways to be killed. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the film is called Frogs and people get killed by just about everything but frogs. The freaking poster/cover art for the film is a frog with a human hand sticking out of its mouth. Why would anyone think this was anything other than a movie about giant killer frogs?
Honestly, if this had been about giant killer frogs, it would have been a better movie. As it stands, it’s at a low point in Ray Milland’s career and an equally low point for Sam Elliott’s facial hair.
Why to watch Frogs: Sam Elliott without a mustache!
Why not to watch: It’s about as dumb as you think it is.