cinema history class: frogs

Session: Aquatic Horrors, Week 3
Movie: Frogs (1972)
Directed by George McCowan

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Swamp critters start exacting revenge against a family of polluters. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

Our in-class discussions have often turned to the topic of Joe's wheelhouse -- those movies that are his cinematic comfort food. Having mentioned that, I'll note that it seems to be the 1960s vividly colored horror movies, often starring Vincent Price. And if Joe is reading this post and I have that wrong, I am sure he will comment to that effect. Unlike Joe, I never really thought of myself as having a cinematic wheelhouse; I did the most movie watching in the 1980s and liked a lot of those films, but I don't think I feel the same attachment to them that Joe does to the Hammer horror films.

I bring that up because, before class last week I watched the trailer for Frogs, and realized that my wheelhouse -- if I can be said to have one -- is the 1970s action/adventure/disaster movies. Watching the Frogs trailer, I could tell that we weren't exactly in for Citizen Kane*, but I also realized that this was the kind of movie that I would love.

Frogs does a really good job of making the titular animals seem menacing. Almost from the beginning, they're everywhere -- watching, waiting. And the camera  makes them seem sinister and calcu8lating in a way that I realize -- or at least I hope -- they aren't in actuality. There may be some false advertising at work here, since the frogs don't actually kill anyone. They're the ringleaders, leaving the killing to their allies, including (but not limited to) spiders, snakes and Spanish moss. And the slow progression of menace brings the movie slowly to a boil, so the viewer has trouble even realizing when things went off the rails.

Oddly I found the penultimate scene puzzling. The way it progressed and ended, I thought it was the end of the movie. But then the final scene, following closely on its heels also felt like a perfect ending. It appears to me that they wrote and shot two final scenes, before deciding which to put last. Both endings are well-done, and either would be worthy. But it's kind of jarring when we go from the first ending back into the film.

Frogs is a much better movie than it has any right to be, and is probably the best killer amphobian movie I've ever had the pleasure of seeing.

 

Ratings:

Me: 9

Christina: 9.3

Ethan: 6

Sean: 2 out of 4

*By coincidence I just recently watched Citizen Kane with Sharon on a Saturday morning.