A Non-review by Professor Popinjay
(1988)
Hoo-boy! What have we here? This film is a piece of work if there ever was one! And I have some history with it!
Hell Comes to Frogtown is a post apocalyptic sci-fi/action flick starring Roddy “Rowdy” Piper as Sam Hell, one of the last fertile men on the planet after a nuclear and biological war makes most infertile. The women-run provisional government forces Sam to rescue a group of fertile women from a town populated by mutant frog people as you might expect. To make sure he does what they require of him, the government attaches an explosive device to his twig-n-berries. Standard government stuff, really.
When I was a kid, the Battletoads beat-‘em-up arcade cabinet was pretty popular, at least in my circles. When a friend called me on my family’s singular wall-mounted telephone and told me the Battletoads movie was on TV, man I believed him.
My dad was present when we turned on what I was led to believe was the Battletoads movie. I remember wondering why I had missed any promotional material, mention of theatrical release, or why it should be on TV so suddenly. Then again, I had the same experience when I finally saw Wes Craven’s 1982 Swamp Thing film and it ACTUALLY was Swamp Thing. As far as I knew, Swamp Thing came out in comics yesterday 1989, not in 1971.
We entered a scene, pretty far into the film, just in time to witness a big frog guy trying to remove the explosive device from Sam’s crotchal region with a chainsaw. The scene must have read as horrific to my dad because we turned it off just as soon as we turned it on.
We waited a while and then gave it another chance just because I so badly wanted to see the Battletoads movie. Now we entered onto a scene where a woman dressed in a night gown doing a sexy dance. Needless to say, we turned it off again.
We gave it one more chance just in time to see Sam lovingly put a paper bag over a frog woman’s head as if this was the only way their relationship was going to work between them. We turned it off again.
It’s funny now that I think back to it. It might not have happened quite like that but that’s how I remember it. Naturally, my curiosity was peaked about what the heck was going on in this bizarre film. Plus I developed a strange attraction to frog people, but that’s besides the point.
Naturally, when I got older, I became curious about what it was we were watching exactly. I concluded on my own that this was definitely NOT a Battletoads movie. But it had to be SOMETHING. It wasn’t until I heard the “How Did This Get Made” podcast for Hell Comes to Frogtown that I started making connections.
I agree with the consensus view: This has the plot of an adult film. It never goes that far though. Sure, it gets a little steamy now and then but what my dad decided to leave to our imaginations really never came to much fruition when the scenes were allowed to play out. Obviously, the whole thing WAS highly suggestive though.
So why did it appeal to me? The frog people of course! I was collecting Ninja Turtles figurines like crazy and going ga-ga for anthropomorphic amphibians wherever they turned up.
I finally watched Hell Comes to FrogTown all the way through. Let me tell you, it is ridiculous. You could almost consider it a spoof of Mad Max if Mad Max wasn’t already a spoof of itself. This is made especially obvious by the disjointed B-rate sequels with titles like Toad Warrior (1996), Max Hell: Frog Warrior (2002), Return to Frogtown (1993, aka Frogtown II). Three films I did not know existed and now must see, much to my wife’s chagrin I am sure.
I had a lot of laughs. It’s not a film to be taken too seriously. Sam Hell is hardly admirable but I think that portrayal was meant to endear him to the hyper-masculine demographic to whom this film was directed.
Actually this film’s demographic is a bit of a mystery to me. Everything is VERY sexually charged but the frog people were definitely an aspect that appealed to children. I mean they certainly got my attention when I was a kid but I was not allowed to watch this for obvious reasons.
And honestly, I’ll never watch this again. But if you’re into terrible movies that didn’t age particularly well and are fun to make fun of, this one is pretty great.
I came across Roddy Piper in public a while back. He was walking out of a Hollywood Video. I think he noticed the look of recognition on my face and quickly looked away. I can’t be sure why he wasn’t feeling up to being congenial to a fan at the moment but I highly suspect this film is to blame.
Poster art!
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