Going to the FROGS

Although one still catches the occasional well-known aging face in low-budget, schlocky SF movies, the real heyday for such usually humiliating appearances came in the 1970's. Whatever momentary lapse of common sense (or depleted financial circumstances) prompted veteran actors to accept such parts, the fact remains that far too many Oscar winners may be known to moviegoers of the last quarter of the last century only for these disastrous exercises.

This small tirade is by way of introduction to Frogs, a 1972 tale of amphibian-induced eco-terrorism written by Roberts Hutchinson and Blees and directed by George McCowan. The most offensive thing about this silly waste of time isn't that it's boring and predictable, although it is. It isn't even that it employs every "Nature's revenge" cliche every devised, although it does.

No, the really offensive thing about this movie is that someone persuaded an actor of the caliber and reputation of Ray Milland to embarrass himself by participating in it.

Like most of its ilk, Frogs places a small cluster of essentially unlikeable people in an isolated area--in this case a privately owned island next to a mini-Everglades--then confronts them with a karmic revolt of the area wildlife. There is, of course, the noble hero, a freelance photographer named (are y'all ready?) Pickett Smith, played by Sam Elliott. Elliott strides through the movie with an expression that suggests he either has or will be finding a new agent as soon as the filming wraps.

Providing the equally requisite eye candy is Joan van Ark as Karen Crockett, daughter of the tyrannical tycoon Jason Crockett--painfully portrayed by Milland. The balance of the characters are straight from the cookie cutter labeled "decadent Southern rich people."

Smith is emerging from the bayou after photographing the appalling evidence of pollution when his canoe gets swamped by a speedboat containing van Ark and Adam Roarke as her brother, Clint. While waiting for his own clothes to dry, Smith gets a loan of duds from Clint, which fit perfectly despite the fact he's a good head taller and has a totally different body type. Not only that, but they have identical taste in clothes--Smith's borrowed ones look just like his own.

Everybody whines about the noisy frogs, which are assembling on the lawn in droves. Jason Crockett tells them he's sent George the handyman to poison them, but when said handyman fails to return he sends Smith out to look for him. He finds George face down in a puddle, dead of multiple snakebites. The camera moves in for a close-up of the devastated corpse--which is still breathing.

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