Hell Comes to Frogtown

After the revolution, there were several obscure distribution companies that flooded our small video market with even more obscure, cheap crap. One of them was a company whose name I can no longer remember and its flagship was Hell Comes to Frogtown. The cover had a muscular guy with a submachine gun and a voluptuous lady at his feet, and around him stood resolute-looking frogs with firearms of various kinds. Now tell me, who can resist that? So, my mate Cooper and I rented it, looking forward to some cheesy B-movie. It was worse than we expected. Awfully lame and amateurish, though the actors with the bad make-up had something going for them. Basically, nothing, but that's just my moral justification for paying 20 crowns for this crap and sacrificing an hour and a half of my time. (11.05.2003)

The problem with most of these post-apocalyptic B-movies with mutated animals is usually the same: a) they have a damn appealing title and poster, and b) they are endlessly demented. Hell Comes to Frogtown has both. Although I have to admit that the masks of the frogs were relatively good and the female cast was so good (I don;t mean their acting) that men’s chins will drop to the floor. It’s not really good enough for one star so I’m giving it for the funny suspensor with the built-in bomb... :) (30.11.2007)

Hell Comes to Frogtown combines elements of both trash and genre classics like America 3000, A Boy and His Dog and Escape from New York, has a wonderful cast led by Roddy Piper and Sandahl Bergman, and a premise and individual elements that could have made it a superbly campy trash flick. Unfortunately, however, all of that potential is buried under the incompetent direction and a shoddy screenplay, if there even was a screenplay. It’s no coincidence that director Donald G. Jackson later became famous as a practitioner of Scott Shaw's “Zen filmmaking”, which is based on dispensing with screenplays entirely. Hell Comes to Frogtown thus remains a typical product of the VHS era, when it sufficed to have an idea that could succeed based on the poster or trailer (both of which are excellent in this case), whereas the film itself was sort of a secondary obligation and it was preferable not to put too much effort into it. Nevertheless, this fiasco is now an unexpected curiosity, as it exhibits surprisingly strong parallels to nothing less than Mad Max: Fury Road. Here we also have an iconic hero (Roddy Piper was a famous wrestler) who is a passive onlooker through most of the film with no influence over the development of the narrative, strong active heroines and a story about liberating breeding-stock women from the clutches of the villain, which escalates in a chase scene involving insanely modified cars through a wasteland. However, it is necessary to add that unlike Miller’s thoroughly emancipatory masterpiece, Hell Comes to Frogtown is in the expected spirit of 1980s machismo and flattery of the patriarchy, not to mention a disturbing scene approving of rape as a penalty for drug use. It’s nice to see that society and pop culture have advanced since the time of Hell Comes to Frogtown. (15.08.2015)