Hell Comes To Frogtown (1988).....carried with it tremendous potential to become a bona fide cult movie, born to spawn sequels, merchandise and inspiration for decades of comic-con cosplayers.....
How could it miss? Wrestling villain 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper as the last man in post-apocalyptic America with a working penis and a libido to match......hot babes kidnapped by a nuke-spawned, raggedy 'Mad Max' community of oversized mutant frogs......and Amazonian warriors (Sandahl Bergman and Cec Verrall) who've strapped an ironclad belt around Roddy's schlong, that precious sausage having been declared government property, meant only for impregnating fertile females.
Juicy, gooey, cheesy fun, no?
No.
The shlockmeisters who cobbled together this direct-to-VHS quickie did throw out a load of crazy ideas...and hurled them all into the screenplay like spaghetti against the wall......
But they forgot the golden rule.....if you hope to make a crazy cult movie, all your crazy ideas won't mean diddly if you don't really bring the crazy when trying to visualize them......
Cult movies mostly become cult movies by accident, created haphazardly by artists so engrossed in their own screwball bubble, it never crosses their minds how audiences would react to their work.
Filmmakers who try to intentionally make a cult movie with studied calculation (as we suspect the 'Frogtown' bunch did) usually crash and burn. Cause there's no real crazy in the execution of the film itself......and viewers can sense when they're being conned.
We could spot the phony baloney cultism in this movie right away......the aura of smirking, self-satisfaction in the dialogue delivery and most of all, the slack, near dead pacing of the entire movie. That special spark of lunatic invention that defines the direction of true cult movies makes no appearance here. Its creators expected their script alone to do the work for them. When it came to actually shooting the film, they brought nothing to the party and it shows.
For those hardy souls determined to go dumpster-diving through this movie in search of a few funny bits and pieces, you will in fact find a few. Rory Calhoun, once a 1950's western movie star shows up as an ancient, pop-eyed, scarecrow ally of Piper. The frog costumes and make up, considering the rock-bottom budget, are quite remarkable. Bergman and Verrell shed their clothes to display their spectacular superstructures......and Roddy does furious battle with both frog honcho Commander Toty and a vile human arms dealer, played by reliable scary hulking villain William Smith.
But don't expect that special demented high you'd enjoy from a true mad, mad cult movie. "Hell Comes To Frogtown" settled for being nothing more than a cheapo forgotten videocassette destined to gather dust on video store shelves before they closed altogether. ....
If you must, you can exhume it on free streaming services like Tubi.....1 star (*).
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