Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Frogs

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb, and we have an older episode for you here today. This one originally published for 16, 2021. It is our look at 1972's Frogs, starring a young, sexy Sam Elliott and just a whole bunch of reptiles and amphibians. It is a bona fide Florida movie. We really enjoyed watching this one, recording this episode, and I just kind of forgotten about it for a while. So happy to revisit it here for you today.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

And I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to wander into the swamp and get a little bit muddy. Rob, the movie that we're doing today, you picked out because of some recent Florida Brain inspiration.

That's right. I was in Florida over spring break, and it just got me inspired. I just really wanted to do a Florida movie. Maybe it was driving through Tate's Hell or driving out through Tate's Hell. I'm not sure which of the two. But I started brainstorming. I was thinking, okay, what are the Florida movies? And we may come back to some of the other ones that were knocking around in my head. But then I started thinking about and reading about a particular 1972 film, titled Frogs. And when I looked into it, I realized this is a movie that is set in Florida. It was filmed in Florida in its entirety. This is the film we have to do.

So this is our first Nature Strikes Back film, but it's also our first Florida film. I think it's our first Nature Strikes Back film.

I guess I can't think of another one, but I find it hard to believe we've made it this far on Weird House Cinema without doing a Nature Strikes Back movie. The classic Nature Strikes Back movie has one sort of giant animal that represents nature's revenge against humanity for, I don't know, for having cities or for polluting nature or something like that, for doing something that is violating the sanctity of the natural world. And then we're punished by monsters.

This movie has more of a distributed strike back policy.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I would say, yeah, Nature Strikes Back films tend to go either a swarm route or a war by champion route. But this was a huge deal, especially in the 70s. This was a decade that gave us Piranha, Prophecy, that's a mutant bear film, Alligator, Grizzly, Empire of the Ants, The Swarm, Killer Bees, Willard, that's a Orca, that's a killer whale movie. Squirm, that's an earthworm movie that's excellent. That's a Georgia movie, though. Maybe we'll come back to that eventually. And, of course, we also got Jaws out of this. So out of Nature Strikes Back, the summer blockbuster itself was born.

Okay, yeah. Well, so I would say with Jaws, I don't particularly see the element of, like, humanity provoking the thing. Like, you know, you're seeing– Jaws would be a very different movie. if it started by showing like radioactive barrels in the surf and then everything else was the same. So I think in Jaws, Jaws weirdly is like the best movie of the bunch, but it's also like the least defensible from a moral point of view because it's just like, well, this shark's just, it's just an animal, but it's huge and bad.

Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, there are so many movies like this. And I was actually just thinking while you were listing those movies there, Have you ever seen the William Shatner tarantula attack movie Kingdom of the Spiders?

I don't think I've seen it in its entirety, but I'm sure I caught part of it on TNT back in the day or something.

Yeah, I was trying to remember if that one has any element of like nature being, if the spiders are provoked by humanity in any way, or if they just start, you know, multiplying out of nowhere.

Yeah, I guess in general, you might think of Nature Strikes Back films as sort of being the cinematic outpouring of of the public awakening to the damage that we are doing to the planet and its natural environments and the creatures and the various species that make it up. Though, given that we're dealing with genre films and often be pictures, it's sort of a, I don't know, you often get the impression it's kind of a sense of like, oh, well, let's explore this in B-movie so we don't have to think about it anymore, you know? Or here's the imagined revenge. Okay, now we're good. Now we can go back to the polluting ways.

Yeah, I would say that it actually comes in a couple of waves. So you see something that is like a precursor to nature strikes back films in the 1950s, but there it's all atomic panic. Like it's the... the contaminating human behavior that precipitates the giant animal attack is some kind of nuclear testing. It's nuclear research, nuclear waste dumping, nuclear weapons testing. And for quite understandable reasons, that was on people's mind in the 1950s. But I think there was a shift in the 1960s away from the contamination being nuclear in nature to being primarily chemical in nature.

And I think This probably had something to do with, you know, Silent Spring came out in the 60s and that sort of alerted people to ideas about pesticides and other, you know, chemical contamination of nature. So the strain of nature strikes back movies you start seeing in the 60s and 70s, I think, is more like that. There's like pollution of various kinds. There's smog. There's like something gross running out of a pipe. And then you get giant alligators that eat people or something.

Yeah.

And I would say that ultimately the film we're going to discuss today, Frogs, is probably one of the more intelligent versions of this in that it is not a single incident causing a single incident of nature strikes back. It is, as we grow to learn throughout the film, seems to be a global reaction event. to not a specific event or even a specific technology, but to our way of life. And in that, it ultimately is perhaps a more nuanced commentary on our relationship with the natural world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. The way I was thinking of it was it's bio maximum overdrive.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I read somewhere, it wasn't in reference to maximum overdrive, but I know Stephen King saw frogs and I believe he was a fan of it. I think Oh, now I remember what it was. It was something about when he was writing The Shining, he was trying to decide between doing topiary animals and a hedge maze. And frogs was what convinced him that it needed to be topiary animals chasing people. Something about like you look around and there are animals everywhere, I guess.

Wait, what was the other option? You said topiary animals and a hedge maze, but the book has both.

Or a hedge maze.

Wait, doesn't the book have both?

I mainly remember the topiary animals from the book. I don't remember. It's been a long time. I was basically a kid when I read The Shining.

Yeah, me too.

I believe it was lacking a maze, or at least the maze was not the central threat. And then of Kubrick, in his adaptation, decided to go full maze.

That makes sense. OK, yeah. But the topiary animals, they're like bushes that are shaped like lions and stuff that literally like they come after Danny in the book to attack him.

And somehow the frogs helped inspire King to go in the animal bush direction. Very good.

Very good choice, Stephen. Okay, so I guess we've done enough setup to hit the trailer audio. Florida's natural wildlife rebels against humanity in its early 70s environmental horror film. Let's hear that audio.

Suppose nature gave a war and everybody came. The snakes, the birds, the lizards and frogs. And suppose that the polluters, the species on earth called man, were the enemy in that war. I still believe man is master of the world. And then, suppose that the human race lost. Help!

Oh, yeah, that's so good. I'm going to grab my thermos here of Florida tap water that I brought back from the beach. Delicious. All right. Well, let's talk about some of the people involved in this film. Let's start where we tend to start. Let's start talking about the director. It is a Canadian director. uh, this time, which on one hand you might say, well, why not a Floridian?

Why is a Florida Floridian not directing this thing? But then on the other hand, I feel like it makes sense that a Canadian would come to Florida and perhaps that would, uh, that would enable this like leaning into the, the ravenous nature of the Floridian wildlife, you know, uh, not that you don't have some pretty rough and buggy environments in Canada. You certainly do. Uh, but I don't know, in my back of my mind, I'm thinking like, here's this, uh, This Canadian director, George McCowan, showing up and he's just like, oh, my God, this this place is is hellish. This is the perfect setting. It seems like the wild, the wilderness is just trying to consume me at all times.

Right.

Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds, just like gators at every turn. You can imagine the the like, uh, sort of the anthropologists' level of distance and remove from looking at Florida like that, but also with an added sense of horror in this lush, wet, humid environment that's full of beasts.

Yeah, because I love Florida, and Florida has tremendous wildlife, but I've gone on nature walks in the heat of the summer in Florida before, and it is kind of frightening at times. Oppressive might be a better word.

You know, sometimes this movie has a ridiculous amount of like large tetrapod animals in various scenes, like, you know, a number of frogs that I'm sorry is implausible, but that's OK. But but the other end of it is that it doesn't have enough insects. There are like scenes where people are eating outdoors and it's July in Florida and they're not being swarmed by insects. You don't see anything.

Yeah.

I couldn't find anything about when they exactly filmed this in Florida. It is set on the July 4th weekend or something. But there's no way this is this is July in Florida like this. Again, like you say, these scenes with people outside, there would just be bugs everywhere like you wouldn't be able to film it. They must have they must have filmed this in one of the cooler months for sure. Also, there's not a steady sheen of sweat on all the actors at all times.

Oh, yeah, that's funny, too. Yeah, they're all relatively dry, except when they're supposed to be wet from having fallen in the disgusting lake water.

Yes.

But, okay, so who's this guy, George McCowan, the director?

All right, he lived 1927 through 1995. He did a lot of TV work. He also directed the 1979 sci-fi film The Shape of Things to Come, starring Jack Palance. I think I watched a riff track version of this. I, or maybe it was something else I thought, but I've seen this when one form or another, uh.

Just makes me think of the, the line in the mortal combat movie, the Paul WS Anderson one from the nineties where, where Shang Tsung says now for a taste of things to come. Do you remember that scene?

Yeah.

The drums going and the guy with the sock on his head gets shattered.

It's a great, great sample too. Um, So now here's the main thing I knew McGowan from. He directed a lot of, if not all, the episodes of the Canadian broadcasting series Seeing Things, which ran on CBC from 1981 through 1987. And as a kid in Canada, I remember watching this show with my family. It was basically a murder mystery of the week show with a psychic reporter doing all of the crime-solving. It's funny.

I clicked through to this on IMDb. I've never seen this, but immediately it just showed me a gigantic picture of the guy from Scanners.

Yep.

Louis Del Grande, a Canadian actor best known as that bald, mustachioed guy whose head gets blown up in that one scene. Blown up by John– not John Saxon. Michael Ironside.

Michael Ironside, yeah.

Yeah.

Both very strong names, you know.

Yeah.

But yeah, he was also in this show and was one of the creators of this series, Seeing Things. It had a really snazzy theme song. That's the main thing I remember from when I was a kid. And I was trying to figure this out. Scanners and Seeing Things both debuted in 1981, both about psychics, both with this same actor. But I don't know how the connective tissue between the two shows worked. I always kind of assumed that this dude's head blew up in scanners and he's like, I can turn this into a six season series on CPC and pitched it as such. I suspect that might be how it went, but I don't know. The timing is very close.

Wait, there's no heads blowing up in the show. It's just that he would be playing a psychic of some kind.

You mean? Yeah. He would like try and solve a mystery and then he'd get a, like a premonition. He'd get like a vision and then he'd keep solving the mystery. And then there'd be another vision. Um, That seemed to be how things worked. And I remember digging it for some reason as a child, but I was like in kindergarten.

Wait, if he's a psychic reporter, how does that work at the newspaper? Like, can he just get a vision and then report that in his column or does he have to source it somehow?

You've got to get a second source on that. I think that's the standard AP route to take. All right. Writers on this piece, getting back to frogs here. Mm-hmm. Robert Hutchison and Robert Bleas. Not much really to report here, but Bleas wrote a bit for TV, Project UFO, and he wrote Dr. Fibes Rises Again. So that's worth noting.

I think several listeners have asked us to feature Dr. Fibes on Weird House at some point.

So yeah, maybe we'll have to come back to that.

All right.

But let's get to the main beefcake in this particular movie.

Well, it's our hero. The character's name is Pickett Smith, and he is played by the one, the only, the stranger, Sam Elliott.

That is right. Yeah. So Sam Elliott, born in 1941, very much still active and getting Oscar nominations and the like in recent years. Um, but in this picture, he was only 31 years old. He was just full of handsome and swagger, occasionally shirtless and with no mustache whatsoever. So if you're, if you're afraid of seeing Sam Elliott without a mustache, um, I don't know, I guess you might want to steer clear of this picture, but there's nothing to be afraid of. He's still, he's still the Sam Elliott, you know, in love. He's still got that charm.

He's got that swagger. Um, He was previously in a string before this. He was in a string of TV movies and TV series. He had a bit role in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as his card player number two. But but this was one of his his early starring roles.

He's so handsome in this movie. It's hilarious.

Yeah. I mean, he's just he's just really cool in the film. Like he's. There are a lot of other performances in the film that are maybe a little bit more mixed. Either they're too hammy or they're they're too dry. You know, they're a little bit too non-actory. But Elliot just strives with confidence through this picture. And you buy everything he's saying, every scene he's in. He helps hold the film together.

There really are no characters with any complexity in this movie, but I would say that the characterizations in a very shallow horror movie way are very fun. They're like good in that two-dimensional sense or one-dimensional. What's the term there? One-dimensional sense. Like it doesn't have character complexity, but it has very well-drawn shallow horror characters.

Yeah. Sam Elliott is not a cowboy in this, nor is he a philosophic bouncer like we would see in 1989's Roadhouse. But he is a freelance photographer, nature photographer. And that is it's kind of like being a cowboy. So he still has that that kind of free range and vibe in it when it works. Yeah, yeah.

He's a loner. He doesn't need anybody's help. He's the strong, silent type. I mean, he Most of his lines in this movie barely register if you were to look at an audiogram of them. The character says something to Sam Elliott and he's like, mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. A bit monotone, I guess. But yet there's still a lot of personality there. I don't know. He's able to pull it off. I mean, that's probably the key here. That's why he went on to become such a cinematic icon.

Oh, yeah. I mean, he's just got like pyramids of charisma.

Yeah.

So we should note that he's really busting out all the the 1972 fashions in this one He spends a lot of the time in the film strolling around in an all denim wardrobe. So denim long-sleeve shirt Denim pants no belt and the pants are just are so tight that he's essentially naked like if he had a if he had a set of car keys or a set of house keys in his pocket you could have taken a still from this picture and to your local Lowe's or Home Depot, and they could have reproduced the key for you.

Yes.

Yeah.

You're wondering like, are those jeans or is that just body paint?

Yeah, exactly. All right. We'll have more to say on Sam Elliott throughout this episode, but let's get on to the villain of the piece. Not the frogs, but Ray Milland.

He's perfect. He's just this grumpy, nasty, hateful old creep.

Yep.

Yep. Wealthy patriarch of this Floridian family. Um, Hates nature unless it looks good on a wall in his trophy room, that sort of thing. Very much thinks that nature should be crushed under the heel of human progress and wealthy excess. So it's, again, a very cardboard role, but he does it well. Milan is another screen legend. He's done a ton of pictures in TV shows over the years. His biggest roles were probably 1945's The Lost Weekend, 1954's Dial M for Murder, 1944's The Uninvited, but he also did some really choice genre picture work as well. He was in 73's Terror in the Wax Museum. And he was in Roger Corman's 1963 film X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes.

Ah, I've watched this movie on mute before. I've been thinking we should maybe come back to it and watch it with the sound. It's pretty fun, or at least looks fun. I don't know what they say.

Yeah. I did read that apparently Ray Milan did not enjoy making this picture.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he wore a hairpiece for it and was like sweating constantly. And I think actually they left the production early. So there's a pivotal scene at the very end, which I think they had to depend on a lot of body doubles for.

Oh, it's like the Marlboro Man in Not of This Earth, right? He got mad. at his prosthetics and the shooting conditions and just left. But they're like, yeah, we'll work around it.

But maybe that's I mean, he's so good in this. Perhaps part of it is he was using his actual irritation and rage at being stuck in Florida doing this picture.

I don't know.

Yeah, so he plays this guy named Jason Crockett who is the grandpa of this giant family who provide most of the characters in the film who live in a mansion at the side of a– I don't know if it's a lake or a river. It's in the swamp in Florida. And I don't know why exactly you would decide to live at a lakeside mansion in a swamp in Florida if your main character traits– well, I mean I guess his main character trait is just that he's grumpy and he hates everything and everyone. But on top of that, his next major character trait is that he hates nature.

Yeah.

What are you doing out there?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think you'll find examples of this everywhere, though, right? You know, somebody builds a mansion in a swamp and then expects that nature is just going to cooperate with your presence and the degree to which you've unbalanced the immediate surroundings.

Yeah.

All right. Next actor of note, Joan Van Ark is in this playing Karen Crockett, one of the Crockett children in this family. She was a Knott's Landing actor who was also in 1977's The Last Dinosaur.

Yeah, I guess here we're getting into the segment of the cast where there are a lot of cousins. I mean, as the tarantulas and gators and frogs swarm in this movie, so does the movie Swarm with Cousins. There are too many cousins and you lose track of the cousins, but Karen is one of them.

Yeah.

Yeah. You get them confused. I couldn't keep everybody straight.

But she's part of the Crockett brood here. She's one of the many cousins. And this actress, Joan Van Ark, I was looking her up. She did a lot of TV work. She did like soap operas and some mainstream TV stuff like that. The same year she was in Frogs, though, I found that she was also in an episode of The Night Gallery. It was an episode called The Ring with the Red Velvet Ropes. You know this one, Rob?

I don't know this one. You mentioned this one's a boxing one?

Yeah.

Boxing episode?

So the premise is there. Oh, I've forgotten the main actor's name. There's a guy who plays a boxer in it who is either right before or right after a match. I don't remember. He's like in his locker room. And then somehow he gets magically transported to this eerie other dimension with a hotel in it where he is approached by Chuck Connors and his wife played by Joan Van Arck.

And they are trying to convince him to box Chuck Connors in this other dimension. And I don't know why. I think there's a twist ending. It's probably like, oh, he's in purgatory or something. You know, one of those.

Ah, well, you know who it is. I just looked it up. It's Gary Lockwood playing the central character in that Night Gallery episode. So neat.

I don't know. Wait, who's Gary Lockwood?

He was in 2001 A Space Odyssey. He played Dr. Frank Poole.

Oh, okay. All right now. Yeah, well, so he's punching in this one.

All right.

Oh, but one last thing. Joan Van Ark, I also found a credit where she was apparently doing some voice acting in Fallout 4. Like she plays several characters, including some character named Dr. Rosalind Chambers. You remember her? I don't.

I don't remember her. I played Fallout 4, but yeah, good for her. Get that voice acting money. So it's funny.

She was in Frogs, but then we also have plenty of audio of her talking about synths and stuff.

All right. Let's hit another member of the Crockett family here.

Cousin number two.

Yeah, this is Clint, played by Adam Rourke. This is basically a Brooklyn tough guy actor who did a lot of work in the 60s, especially. In this, he plays a speedboat-driving, beer-chugging, meathead son of the Crockett patriarch.

He's like the uncle character in Napoleon Dynamite, right? He's obsessed with his former football career, and he goes around trying to bully people. He seems to want to be the alpha who dominates all of his other cousins, right?

Yeah, and is just waiting for the day when he can inherit something from Grandpa.

That's right, too. Yeah, he's like, we got to play our cards right to get stuff. But I remember there's a scene where he starts saying, I got to play my cards right so I can get that money when Grandpa dies. But the thing he's explaining by saying that is why he's got to be out in the boat drunk on beer all day. So I don't know why.

That's what he thinks Grandpa expects of him in order to get his inheritance.

Yeah.

I will also say in this movie, sometimes Adam Rourke sort of looks like a Baldwin.

Yeah, yeah. At times he does have that Baldwin look.

All right.

Who else we got? Lay out some more Crockett's for us here, Joe.

Okay. Cousin number three. We got Ginny Crockett. Oh, wait. No, I think this is not a cousin, but for all intents and purposes, she's a cousin. She is, I believe, the... Jenny Crockett is married to Clint in the movie, if this matters. You're not going to keep track of this. But it's played by Lynn Borden. Lynn Borden did some TV and B-movie work. She was in Walking Tall with Joe Don Baker, the original one in the 70s. And I found she was in a begrimed drag racing movie starring Peter Fonda called Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. I've never seen this one, but it's a 70s racer film. She was also part of the main cast of a 60s TV show called Hazel. Which looks like a horrid, in-color, 60s, leave-it-to-beaver type show. It appears to be about a housekeeper

named Hazel, played by Shirley Booth, who is apparently just borderline omnipotent. She can solve every problem. I think this used to be a type of TV show where there's just a magic person who's very wise and can do everything.

Sort of a bewitched kind of a thing, then.

Well, except I don't think she's actually magic. I think it's, you know, the other version of this where there's just like a character who's just very wise and knows what to do about everything.

Okay, gotcha.

Now, I guess we're going to skip over a bunch of the other cousin actors. I looked up a lot of them and didn't really recognize anything they had done. There was one actor in this movie, though, when I started digging into her work, I think she's really worth a mention. It's a fairly small part in the film.

But the actress's name is May Mercer, and she plays a character named Maybel, who works in the household staff in the movie. And May Mercer wasn't just an actress. She was actually a blues singer. And I looked up her music, and she was an excellent blues singer. So she lived from 1932 until 2008. And I found a couple of recordings of her music from the 60s on YouTube.

One is a song that she performs with a blues harmonica player named Sunny Boy Williamson called Careless Love. And I think this is from 1965, which is fantastic. Another recording I found of hers was of a song called Sweet Little Angel, also really good. And so I was trying to get some biographical information about her. I found her LA Times obituary from when she passed away in 2008.

So apparently she was born in 1932 in Battleboro, North Carolina, to a family who worked as tobacco sharecroppers. And she started singing in church when she was a teenager and then ran away to New York in 1947 to become a professional singer. And she became successful not just in New York, but eventually internationally. She got well known as a blues performer in Paris. Like I was looking through Google Books and I found her name turning up a lot in issues of Jet magazine from the 1960s on the Paris scratchpad, where she seems to have been a very recognizable figure in the Paris scene. So she was based out of Paris. She sang at a club called the Blues Bar, and then later she actually ran the club.

But she also would tour Europe sometimes with a group called the Keith Smith Climax Jazz Band. She also has a couple of acting credits from the 60s, but it looks like she started acting a lot more in the 1970s, And it's not just stuff like frogs. She was in some hit movies. She was in Dirty Harry with Clint Eastwood.

And in 1971, she was a producer on a documentary film about Angela Davis. So she passed away in 2008. But I will say her music is really good, really worth looking up. Mae Mercer, Mae spelled M-A-E.

All right. Well, you know, another actor who brings some much needed diversity to this otherwise undiverse film. is Judy Pace, who plays Bella Garrington in this. Born 1942, still around, mainstream TV actor and film actor of the day. She appeared in this film on the heels of Brian's Song, which is a famous football film. If you've ever been in or around football culture, this one is often held up.

And I think maybe I've seen it and I've just forgotten all of it. But it has James Caan and Billy Dee Williams in it. So it's got a solid cast.

I've never seen it, but I know it's one of those movies that people talk about, you know, makes the football boys cry.

Yeah.

This is one of those films that you are legally allowed to cry while viewing. This is one of the few times– in some circles where men are allowed to cry.

So I will say Judy Pace and Sam Elliott, I think, are the two most likable actors in this movie. I mean, Ray Milland is good too, but he's playing this nasty, hateable guy.

Yeah, you're not supposed to like Ray Milland.

Right, right, right. She and Sam Elliott, though, are just lovely and wonderful. They've got great charisma in the scenes they're in. She plays, I think, the girlfriend of one of the cousins, I think one of the cousins that we haven't talked about, But she's there at the mansion with the family, and it's otherwise, obviously, this, like, you know, all-white Southern family. And I think the implication is that Grandpa is racist and is giving her the side eye, but she... has a very, like, eye-roll posture against Grandpa and the others.

Yeah, they never really overtly explore this area. And to a certain extent, it's probably for the best, given the way a picture of this period might have handled it before. But it does show that there was a there's a lot of potential in this picture as well. Like what if they had really gone in like almost you could almost gone in like a Jordan Peele direction with this with this sort of picture. You know, there are a lot of interesting cultural elements on the table. But in this picture, you got to save room on the table for the frogs.

So, yeah, I mean, yeah, the frogs are the real star. And I think it's literally true that I think the frogs get more screen time than any actor in this film.

I think so.

There's more time where we're just looking at cutaways of frogs hopping around or close-ups of bullfrogs than, I don't know, than seeing Sam Elliott on screen.

You can imagine the director watching different cuts of the film and being like, I don't know, I think we need more frogs in there. Do we have more of that great frog footage that we got? We got some more alligator snapping turtle, got some more lizards. Let's get it in there.

This is maybe one of those movies where the second unit director is the real director.

Yeah. All right.

Another big name to mention here is the composer on this film, Les Baxter. So despite all the other elements of the film, I have to say it was Les Baxter's presence that kind of sealed the deal for me. So let's start by reminding everyone just who Les Baxter was. He lived 1922 through 1996, and he's pretty much the godfather of exotica music. So If you've ever tuned in for some retro, nostalgic lounge or tiki music, you've probably listened to the music of Les Baxter. If not, look him up on your streaming source of choice. Most of his material is out there, and it's really good stuff.

It's just really great, easy listening music if you want some sort of nostalgic kind of lounge, tiki vibe.

However.

That whole genre has nothing to do with frogs. Don't watch frogs thinking you're going to get that kind of music. It's not an Exotica score in the slightest. So first of all, Baxter was no stranger to doing film scores. He'd done quite a bit of work in the film score business over the years, mostly B-movies. For instance, he scored such films as X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes that we mentioned earlier. He worked with names like Roger Corman and William Castle. He scored Dr. Goldfoot in The Bikini Machine in 1965, The Dunwich Horror in 1970.

He did 1963's Black Sabbath.

Yeah, he scored a bunch of AIP movies, American International Pictures. I think we haven't talked about that yet, but this is an AIP movie. So like a lot of the 50s, 60s and 70s Roger Corman movies were AIP movies, you know, all the Edgar Allan Poe movies that Corman did and stuff like that. But it wasn't just horror. So, you know, AIP released and Les Baxter did the music for, you already mentioned, one of them, of course, the peak subgenre of film innovation, the bikini movies of the 1960s. It really doesn't get more creative and subversive than, you know, the ghost in the invisible bikini in films like that.

So Frogs is notable because it was Baxter's first entirely electronic score. So that was the thing that really got me excited about it. So Baxter was already into the electronic sound. He'd worked with an early electronic organ called the Nova Chord in the very early 60s, and he put out an album called Moog Rock in 1969, which is a synth-powered, easy-listening album that's quite good. I was just listening to it yesterday while putting together some notes. Frogs, however, takes things into equally synthy, but certainly more terror-driven territory.

So it has a lot of like eerie synth chords going on.

It doesn't actually, a lot of it is not very musical. There's not much melody to the music in the film. It is more like synthesizers producing almost a sound that is somewhere between sort of crickets or cicadas and like servos whirring inside a robot.

Yeah, yeah. So it's an interesting score. And that's probably one of the reasons that I don't think this was ever released in full as an album or anything, though I know there have been at least there's been at least one compilation of certain pieces from Baxter's soundtrack work. So it might show up there. But as far as I know, there is never a like a or there at least there has yet to be like a lime green frogs vinyl release where you get the full Les Baxter soundtrack. Yeah.

All right. I just wanted to mention a couple more names that I happened to find something interesting about as they came up in the credits. It is impossible to get into all the cousins in this movie. But one of the cousins I also wanted to mention is this actor named George Scaff, who plays Stuart Martindale. He's an uncle or a cousin or something. But according to IMDb, he had a small part in The Exorcist II, The Heretic, which is a wonderful connection. In Frogs, he's kind of a sketchy Lee Van Cleef style cousin.

Yeah, not nearly as intimidating as Old Angel Eyes, but yeah, has that kind of look to him.

I mean, he always kind of looks like he's hatching a sneaky plan.

Yeah, because he is. He's like a long time. You get the impression that he's earned his place in the family. It's more about loyalty than blood, certainly when it comes to the Crockett patriarch here.

Yeah.

Another actor is Lance Taylor Sr., who plays Charles. He works for the family in the movie. And he was in Blackula the same year as Frogs. He also did some TV work on shows like The Mod Squad, Sanford and Son, and Police Story. But then one name that came up in the credits that I thought was interesting was Gene Corso, who did sound effects for the movie.

And he also did sound effects and sound editing for some very mainstream films that would come later, such as Star Wars A New Hope. Phantasm, Predator, and Deep Star Six, because all roads lead back to the 1989 underwater movies.

Well, you know, it was frogs that got him work in all those pictures. So he gave him his demo reel of all the awesome frog sound effects from this picture. And they were like, let's get him. This is how we imagine the the sonic universe beyond our world.

You know, a number of sound effects from this film did really stick with me. And it wasn't just the frogs croaking or the gators bellowing. It was also the sound of when the giant frogs are thumping against the glass in the scene when Sam Elliott and Ray Milland are like talking in private about what's going on on the island. And suddenly you just hear this kind of thunk thunk and what's happening. Well, that's frogs at your window, buddy.

Yeah.

All right, well, let's jump into this picture here. Let's talk about the plot.

All right, well, the opening credits, as we said, it has this score by Les Baxter, but it's very light on things that are recognizable as melodies. Instead, it's ominous ambient electronic sounds, while Sam Elliott paddles around the swamp in a red canoe. basically just doing it for the gram. He is out there in the, in the canoe taking pictures of everything. And I mean, like it in, in the kind of way that you don't actually see real photographers doing it, where he's just like aiming the camera in every direction and taking pictures all over the place. Like, uh, Rob, I know, uh, you know, you know, a bit about, uh, more about photography that you kind of have to like set up a good shot. You don't just sort of

like turn the camera in every direction.

Yeah.

Like there, there are no, you don't see, um, uh, Sam Elliott here, like holding himself in place by grabbing onto a branch and then taking several shots at the same thing. It's a much more casual affair.

Yeah.

One of the funny things is the way the title comes in. So Sam Elliott, he's wandering around the swamp, taking photos. He's in the canoe. And then there's a close-up on a frog. The frog ribbits twice. And then you get sound effect. And then frogs, the title comes in. And all of the credits are in a really funny font.

It's like a blue... what would you call this font?

I feel like it's something I would say blue drippy horror font is what it is. Yes.

That's on the title for frogs, but I mean the rest of the credits that are just like listing people's names. I feel like it's a font that I saw I've seen in other like sixties and seventies movie credits, but it looks kind of like comic sands. It's not exactly.

Yeah.

It's something like times American international pictures or something.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, but I don't know, for some reason, the credits in this were making me laugh a lot. Like I liked the quotation marks or like some of the actors just get a name credit, you know, with Sam Elliott and so forth. Uh, but then there's one part where it says, and Adam Rourke as so-called Clint, it's got these quotation marks around Clint that I found very funny for some reason.

I also liked how they keep, they keep giving these credits over pictures of various, um, reptiles and amphibians in nature.

Yes.

And it kind of implies that that snake is Adam Rourke as Clint. Like, I don't know. It's just kind of a weird juxtaposition.

Yeah, this is our water viper. His name is Clint. But anyway, another thing, there are way too many animals in the swamp. It's just panning around. There's just animals. everywhere. And I know Florida is lush and its wildlife is bountiful, but no swamp has this much wildlife in it. It's just snakes everywhere you turn.

It is a lot of snakes and a lot of frogs and toads. This movie is just jam packed. with reptiles and amphibians. And in fact, it's one of the things that's worth watching about it. A lot of times I just enjoyed watching really good footage of reptiles and amphibians, either moving about in a natural way or certainly later in the picture, invading human spaces.

Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of that. I mean, I guess, I don't know why I'm saying there's too many. I mean, would I want there to be fewer reptiles in this movie? No. I mean, I'm just saying like, At the very beginning when it hasn't yet introduced the idea that the island is being swarmed with reptiles because nature is striking back, it seems like a ridiculous amount of animals.

I think the question you need to ask, Joe, is could it possibly have more?

Right, yeah. Well, speaking of beasts, actually it does have more because it's not just the reptiles that are the beasts in this film. Looking at Sam Elliott in these opening credits... He is just an off the charts cool beast. Like I said, he has so much animal charisma. It's funny.

Yeah.

Look at this dude. Yeah.

And again, I was prepared to be creeped out by his lack of a mustache because I often find that's the case with iconic mustachioed actors is you see him without the mustache. It's like, what are you doing, man? With that giant lip or giant four lip area. But no, he's just as charming without it.

So he's paddling around the swamp. So first he's taking pictures of animals. But then after that, it seems like he's mainly taking pictures of litter. There are just sort of barges of litter that are, you know, clogging up the byways of the swamp. So I would say this movie has an example of something that's actually a kind of common problem with set dressing, especially in lower budget movies.

which is the lack of a history to the objects you're looking at. And what I mean by that is the garbage in this movie that is littering the swamp looks incredibly fresh. All of the paper garbage is still crisp and white and the cans are clean and they're not like oxidized or covered in mold. You know, it's been pointed out that one of the great innovations of those beloved late 70s sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Alien and Star Wars was that they made spaceships and the future generally lived in, meaning dirty, worn in and worn out, as opposed to what had been, you know, the previous style for futuristic sci-fi, which is like everything is clean and fresh and the spaces look like nobody's

ever been in them before. In Frogs, I must accuse them of having failed to make the trash look lived in.

Yeah, I guess part of it is that this film was filmed in its entirety at Eden Garden State Park in Florida, which is in Santa Rosa Beach. which I haven't been there, but now it is definitely on my list of places to go. You can look it up, Eden Garden State Park. You can visit it. You can be married here. You know, you can paddle around. A frogs-themed wedding? Yeah, you can paddle around in canoes. You can do everything that our hero does in the film.

But it makes me suspect that perhaps it was not the best place to catch the actual footage of real litter. Even at the time, it was maybe just really well cared for. And so, yeah, they had to bring their own litter for this shoot, for this part of the film.

I can't stop thinking about a wedding at this place now. You could walk down the aisle to the cricket servos.

Yeah. The big old house that features into this and all the outdoor scenes, it's all at Eden Garden State Park.

The ring bearer is an alligator.

Yeah.

But so several things about the trash here also. One of the things is, do you think Coca-Cola paid to have their logo shown among all the trash in the swamp? Because it's there.

I don't know. I mean, it's product placement, even if it is litter.

Yeah.

Also, one thing that's funny is the swamp here has the single piece of movie garbage that best represents Ultimate Squalor, the discarded plastic baby doll. You know the trope I'm talking about?

Yep.

Like that's how you know that a place is really abject in a film is it's not just litter. It's not just trash. It's a discarded baby doll.

It's interesting, too, given that here in Atlanta we have Dolls Head Trail.

Yeah.

Which I know you've been to as well where an individual has taken to using found garbage from the park itself. And in many cases, toys and baby dolls. Yeah. and recreate them, like rearrange them to create art in the natural environment. And it works. But part of that is it's stuff that was already there. He's not bringing in baby dolls. And indeed, I will advise everyone, please do not bring baby dolls into parks to create things. Also, don't bring Christmas ornaments in on your nature trails and start decorating Christmas trees on the nature trails. Yeah, I saw that over the break. And granted, you know, people...

People need things to do during the pandemic, and they're getting more into nature walking. But don't bring out a bunch of Christmas garbage onto the nature trail and decorate something. Let's keep the artistic expression to a limit.

You can decorate trees at home.

Yeah, decorate trees at home all you want, but I'm here to see the actual trees. Doll's Head Trail is fine, though.

Okay, anyway, that's just the opening credits. We get Sam Elliott taking pictures of all the trash in the swamp. Then we immediately cut to jerks in a speedboat. And this is a couple of cousins here, a couple of the main cousins. We get Clint, who is Adam Rourke again, and we get Karen, who is Joan Van Ark. And they're cutting around the water in a powerboat, and Clint is chugging a cold one while driving.

Yep.

Anyway, I don't know if it's supposed to be that Clint is just a bad boat driver in general or if it's because he's been drinking the beer. But he does not see Sam Elliott in his canoe and he just drives right by him, capsizes him, and Sam Elliott's all wet. And, of course, Sam Elliott is not amused.

They circle back and they give him a ride and they say, you know, we'll tow you back to the house tomorrow. which is a big old mansion with a waterside backyard. And they invite him to stay for the fun and games, which sounds kind of sinister.

Yeah.

And it is not subtle with the frogs at all. Like we, you know, we get to the dock and it's just cutting to frogs constantly. You know, the characters say a couple of lines cut to frogs and they're just sitting there with their eyes being ribbiting and the, you know, the throat sacks bulging. And then they're like, Hey, would you like to stay at our creepy mansion? And then the frogs, but, but.

Yeah, the frogs are massing, and there is an overwhelming sense that the frogs are watching. Yes.

So we learn some things. We learn the characters' names. Of course, Sam Elliott introduces himself. His character's name, once again, is Pickett Smith. And Adam Rourke is Clint, and Joan Van Allen is Karen. And so Karen takes Pickett Smith to meet Grandpa Crockett. They also meet a guy named, she introduces as my cousin, Michael Martindale, one of the mini cousins. This guy looks kind of like a fascist pool attendant. Like he's got this cool sort of, I don't know, like single color resort wear outfit with a big collar. But he's also got the cool hand Luke sunglasses.

Yeah.

But then, my God, the picket Smith chest hair. Like everybody in this movie wears their shirt unbuttoned a few buttons down. And Sam Elliott's chest hair could be put in a ponytail. It's unbelievable. But anyway, so there's an introduction scene. We meet Grandpa Crockett. He is ornery from word one. He saw Sam Elliott paddling around and taking pictures, he says, and he does not appreciate the taking of the pictures. He's like, there's a sign out there. It says private property. And he says that it's illegal for Sam Elliott to have been taking pictures. I don't know why that would be illegal. But we learn that Sam Elliott, in fact, is here as a private freelance photographer. Actually, he calls it a furtographer. And he's taking pictures of

pollution for an ecology magazine. And the funny thing is, so he says this, and this gets Cousin Michael immediately going on about frogs. So he's like, I've taken pictures. I'm a freelance photographer for an ecology magazine. And Michael's like, take any pictures of frogs lately? I saw the biggest bullfrog earlier. And it just makes you wonder what other topics of conversation cousin Michael will try to steer back to the bullfrog anecdote. Somebody's like, would you like to put on some music? Hey, speaking of music, have you ever heard what a bullfrog sounds like? I caught the biggest bullfrog. But we also learn from this conversation that Grandpa Crockett has been spraying poison all around his property

to try to keep all this disgusting wildlife at bay, because there is nothing worse than animals. And so he's been using, I guess, poisons and insecticides to the absolute max to try to put an end to it, and it is not working. But anyway, so Sam Elliott and Karen go back to the house, and then there's a funny moment where Sam Elliott, who again is a freelance photographer for an ecology magazine... He has to call his editor immediately from this dude's house.

Well, you know, freelancing can be a little lonely sometimes. Sometimes you just check in. with your editor just to say hi.

Oh, that's a good, I didn't think about it like that. Maybe he's just being polite and actually he's calling somebody to be like, send help. I'm at this creepy house. But, of course, the phone doesn't work because that's a standard feature of Nature Strikes Back movies is that our technological infrastructure fails us when the animals begin to rise up.

Yeah, the frogs are, I guess, we never see them actually cut a phone line, but it's implied that they're out there doing it.

Yes.

So, anyway, in the meantime, we get a little walkthrough to meet a bunch of the rest of the cast. We meet Ginny, who is played by Lynn Borden. This is Clint's wife, who she's showing off some cute drawings by the kids. She seems generally irritated. She is short-tempered, and she is irritated by the news that Clint is wet from the water. Oh, yeah, because we didn't mention that.

Sam Elliott pulls Clint into the water when they go to help him out of the water, I guess as revenge for capsizing his canoe.

Kind of smacks him one, too, I think.

Yeah. Then we also meet Aunt Iris, who appears eccentric. She enjoys trapping butterflies in a glass bell jar, and that lust for butterflies will be her undoing later on.

Yes, it will.

We meet Cousin Kenneth, who is another cousin who has no identifying features whatsoever, except that he's another one who cannot button up his shirt. I guess the only thing interesting about Cousin Kenneth is that he is the boyfriend of Bella Garrington, who is played by Judy Pace, who I said, you know, other than Sam Elliott, the most likable actor in the movie. And I think she and Cousin Kenneth, they're supposed to be an item. And like several other characters, Bella Garrington here seems dressed a little warm for July in Florida. She's wearing like this kind of long sleeve, long pants, like rock star outfit when we first meet her. Also, did you notice that when we first meet Cousin Kenneth and Bella, they are playing

with a Ouija board?

I missed that.

Yeah, it's on the table between them. They've got their hands on the, what do you call it, the planchette, the little thing.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know what spirits, and maybe they're trying to get messages from the frogs or something.

It's just spelling out ribbit, ribbit on the board, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know what it means. But so Sam Elliott and Clint then take showers to wash the lake off, and then there's a great scene where they just stand around toweling off and talking about Clint's football days.

Yeah, because that's all Clint has are the old football days. Uh, the, the beer, the speed boats in the dream of one day, uh, inheriting some money from the patriarch.

That's right. So, uh, grandpa Crockett, and then there are other uncles and cousins that I didn't even get into yet, but, uh, too many to talk about. So grandpa Crockett assembles everybody for a buffet lunch on the lawn. And this is another scene that in reality would be swarming with insects. I've been to Florida in the summer. But of course, it's not. At least we don't see any insects. We do cut away to frogs a lot. But I liked how this buffet lunch is complete with at least five different kinds of liquor that we can see on camera and a bunch of logo-facing bottles of Coke. So again, I'm wondering what's going on there. But we see Gordon's vodka.

We see some kind of scotch and then multiple glass decanters with other liquors in them.

I have to say it's refreshing to see forward-facing labels on beverage bottles in a motion picture because at times it can get a little obnoxious where you're like, come on, movie. I know you don't want to show me that that's a Coca-Cola or show me that that is this other brand of beverage. it gets a little too precise at times.

So I'm happy to see the beverage logos here for a change. Yeah.

Oh, also the scene has some good Ginny chewing Clint out for drinking a fifth of vodka every night.

Yeah.

But somehow conversation just keeps coming back to frogs. Everybody's trying to talk it. So she's like chewing him out for drinking vodka, but somehow this gets related to frogs. And then grandpa says to Sam Elliott, you see more frogs than usual this year. And And Sam Elliott's like, well, yeah, sometimes animals overpopulate, but they'll die off by next year.

And Grandpa, of course, is like, what are you, some kind of ecologist? And then there's broader discussion on why frogs are bad and what would be the best ways to kill frogs.

And this is all great because it's ultimately leading up to something. Like, why is Grandpa even remotely tolerating this stranger here who has– you know, already seems to have unsavory connections to environmentalism. Well, it's because he has a need of him. He has a task for him.

That's right. So Grandpa Crockett wants, he takes Sam Elliott aside and he's like, I want you to take a look around and investigate the frogs, apparently so he can put the family's minds that he is about frogs, I think. Plenty more cutaways to frogs, ribbit, ribbit. But then also we get a little secret meeting on the side where Grandpa also wants Sam Elliott to go looking for his professional frog executioner, Grover, who had been sent out earlier that morning to spray for frogs, but who never returned.

And when he sends Sam Elliott out on this mission to find Grover, Grandpa's like, do you want to take along a gun? He's just got a room full of guns and animal heads mounted on the wall. And he's like, you want one of these rifles? And of course not. Sam Elliott is far too cool to shoot at a frog with a rifle.

And he also lays out a sick burn on Grandpa's trophy room. He's like, no, I don't believe a frog head would much improve the space or something to that effect.

Yeah, except he says it in fewer words somehow.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's got that Sam Elliott charm to it. So it doesn't feel particularly thorny, you know. again, he just plays it so cool in this film.

Sam Elliott, I wonder if he just went through the script with a red pen and he took every time his character spoke and reduced the number of words in the line by half or even more. He's very laconic.

Yeah.

Okay. So anyway, Sam Elliott, he wanders through the woods and he stumbles across a big canister of poison and then This part's great. There's like a parade of dead animals of every kind. So you see dead frog, dead snake, dead eagle. And then like I thought he was going to come across a penguin next, but then it just gets into a lot of frogs and snakes. And he eventually finds Grover face down in a puddle. Is he alive or dead? I guess he is whatever you are when the script says you're dead, but you are obviously still breathing.

Yeah. The movie makeup says he's dead, though, because he had like a big old chunk taken out of his face.

Right.

And his face is blue.

Yeah.

Though I should again stress, you know, this film is not particularly grisly. It is actually rated PG. So any scene like this, it's not as horrific as it would be in other films, not to say horrific as Squirm is, where you have a lot of really, really gross special effects to drive home nature's vengeance. It's pretty tame in this film, but it works. You know, it's shot and presented well.

Yeah, yeah. The gore is relatively tame.

Yeah.

Though sometimes the deaths, like if you were to imagine them, the implications are really awful. But yeah, they don't.

Show it on screen. It does a good job with that, you know, implying the death, at least non-frog related deaths anyway. We'll get to that in a bit.

But anyway, so we come back to the house and check in with the other characters. There was a nice little scene with May Mercer, who plays Maybel, who works at the house, and then Judy Pace, who again plays Bella Harrington. They have a nice little scene where they share a drink together and they sort of commiserate with a great big eye roll about the family. And we find out that Bella Harrington's birth name is also Maybel.

But anyway, we get to all of the floristocrats who are sitting around in the mansion gabbing. And Grandpa says he thinks Grover deserves to be dead in a ditch. They have not gotten the news that he is dead in a ditch. They're just imagining, I wonder if he's dead in a ditch, which will turn out to be true.

And he's like, well, I hope he is because he's late coming back. And then Karen is like, Grandpa, that's awful. You make us sound like the worst of the ugly rich.

Yeah, to which he replies, we are the ugly rich.

But then we get a great speech by Aunt Iris where she's like, we're entitled to be ugly, Karen. We pay so many taxes. And then she starts going on this rant about environmental regulations on her paper mills that are costing her a fortune. And anyway, Sam Elliott comes back and he informs Grandpa Crockett that Grover is dead.

And their conversation is interrupted when frogs are thumping against the windowsill. That was the sound effect I was talking about earlier with the thump thump. And then somebody screams from the other room. It was a Maybel. So what could it be? And everybody runs in and there is a snake hanging from the chandelier in the dining room.

Everybody just crowds in while ominous music throbs on the soundtrack. Snake's right there over the dinner table. And then I laughed out loud at this. Grandpa Crockett whips out a revolver, shoots the snake. The snake falls dead on the dinner table. And then he asks Charles to remove the snake. And then he's like, all right, everybody, let's eat. Yeah.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. Because, of course, there's no reason that a snake would be in your chandelier. It's a real turtle on a fence post kind of moment.

But then we get into a bunch of just little conversation scenes. There's this philosophical debate between Sam Elliott and Grandpa Crockett about whether man is the master of nature or not. Sam Elliott seems to believe that humans and frogs can coexist peacefully. How naive he is.

Yeah, this is a great scene. I think I ended up watching this one twice. Yeah. I didn't have to rerun just to get it because I could tell like this is the heart of the movie. This is where the central argument is being played out.

Yeah. And then there's a great part where Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott seems to get what's going on. He's like, oh, I see. This is a nature strikes back film. So he's like, what if nature were trying to get back at us for all of the pollution and the littering? And the response is nonsense. And Sam Elliott says, well, then how do you explain it? But note that the it that Sam Elliott seems to be at a loss to explain otherwise is so far Grover was bitten by a snake and died. There are a lot of frogs hopping around and there was a snake on the chandelier.

Well, still, it's all adding up to something. I guess so. But yes, Sam Elliott is his whole presentation in this, though, is like another actor in this role might have. been more insistent you know and more um you know argumentative on this point but he's just kind of he's like laying it out there he's like well you know what do you think's happening you know look around us look at how we're treating the world you know this this is what this is what it is man.

Gentle wise and charming he sells it so good yeah uh and a bunch of other conversations going on we learned oh there's a scene with clint and jenny arguing they're you know uh they're they're talking about how jenny resents that clint spends all day drunk driving a speedboat And this is the part where he retorts that he needs to play his cards right so that he can get his inheritance.

Yeah. Life is hard for old Clint here.

Yeah. There's some very hardcore flirting between Sam Elliott and Joan Van Ark. Clearly there's an attraction there. And then meanwhile, I was noticing there is such creepy decor in this house. I feel like this about a lot of I think especially like Southern American houses from the like, you know, sixties and seventies where you see this like mixture of sometimes like more modern furniture decorations, but also just like weird, creepy, old antebellum looking stuff. Everything is just like haunted daguerreotypes of 19th century Florida vampires up on the wall. There's this guy, I captured one of the, one of these for us to look at. There's just some, creep staring at us from a daguerreotype from 1954 or 1854. And

I don't know, he looks like he wants my blood. He wants my life force.

Well, some of this, I don't know, they might have dressed it up a little bit. I couldn't get a lot of interior photos online of the mansion here. But yeah, this is the Wesley Homestead from Eden Garden State Park.

Oh, okay.

And it was apparently built in 1897. And then in 1963, Louis Maxon bought and renovated the house. quote, creating a showplace for her family heirlooms and antiques.

OK, so maybe this Dementor is a is a family heirloom.

Yeah. Or maybe they felt like they needed to night gallery up the picture. I don't know. I can see it going either way.

So, yeah, there's a bunch of other just sort of like. social stuff going on. There's not a lot of depth to any of it. There's a sequence where Clint is just wandering around bullying people and trying to get somebody to play this log jousting game with him. I don't know if you could explain this. They're like trying to stand on a log and hit each other with pillows, but nobody wants to play with Clint because he is drunk and abusive.

Well, yeah, I think part of it is just like Clint sucks and you should be okay with it when the animals kill him later. But also this is a scene where I had a laugh at it because Yeah, he's horsing around in this log, pushing people over and proclaiming himself to be the king of the log. And then this is juxtaposed with an image of like a gecko or something walking on a limb as if the gecko is interjecting and saying, ah, foolish human, I am the king of the log. Clearly, look at my appendages and how easily I cling.

Yeah, you know nothing about stick dominance.

Yes.

But so it's right about so we're here at like halfway through the movie and it's right here that nature really starts striking back I would say up until now it's been mostly set up but now it just sort of turns into a nature kill spree at about the 45 minute mark and that doesn't stop until the movie's over Right.

The frogs have announced the first wave to begin.

Yes.

And so it does.

Right.

So we get Michael Martindale, one of the many cousins, after being bullied by Clint. So he gets bullied by Clint, knocked off the log. And then he's like, well, I'll show everybody. And he goes and he gets a shotgun, drives off in a Jeep. And I guess maybe this is his favorite hobby. He just starts shooting at random birds.

Mm-hmm.

I didn't really get what was going on here. It does not seem to be an organized hunting expedition. It looks more like he's just sort of like working out his frustrations on the birds.

Yeah.

Yeah. Just generally being a jerk to nature. Yeah.

But also while this is going on, we get– Sam Elliott, he goes walking in the woods. He sees many, many reptiles. And then we see Cousin Michael. He starts running for some reason. I don't remember why he starts running. I guess he sees an animal that scares him. And he shoots himself in the leg. And then there is, I don't know, there are many glorious nature attack scenes in this film. But one of the best is what happens here.

It is a Spanish moss attack. I don't know how else to describe it.

Yeah, it is a straight up Spanish moss attack. Like at first, it just seems like, oh, he fell in the Spanish moss and now he's gotten entangled in it. But no, like the Spanish moss seems to be crawling around him. It seems to be animate.

It's sentient Spanish moss.

Yeah. So the Spanish moss kill scene here is just wonderful. It seems to indicate that Spanish moss is just teeming with tarantulas, which it is not. Though I should note, there is an old wives tale that Spanish moss is filled with... trombiculatae, red bugs, or chiggers, as they're often called. But apparently there's no truth to this. These creatures prefer the tall grass. But weirdly, you still see this association repeated all over the place, despite scientific research to the contrary.

The only possible connection I can find is that perhaps after the moss has touched the ground or fallen onto the ground, then you can have the red bugs, the chiggers, crawl into the Spanish moss, and that's how people could potentially get them. But for the most part, these parasites are going to be on the grass where they reach out, questing for humans or other animals to latch onto.

Oh, that's the scientific term, isn't it?

Questing? Yes, yeah. I always, because it's such a creepy term, just imagining them moving their little appendages, just questing for flesh.

But here it's tarantulas. So the Spanish moss, the sentient Spanish moss- It envelops Cousin Michael, whichever cousin this is. He drowns in the moss, and then tarantulas just swarm out of it. And I think one of them maybe crawls into his mouth. They just attack him, and he dies.

Yeah, one of the things about this film, and it's also been one of the things that's really great, is that all the animals are alive. I don't think we really see any prop animals or puppet animals used.

I think there's some of the dead ones.

Yeah.

Maybe, yeah, for the dead ones. But in terms of like, there is no cutaway and then like a puppet biting somebody on the neck, which is one of the reasons probably you don't see any grislier death scenes in this. You know, a lot of the gore and violence is implied. But it also means you don't have any cheesy puppets. Like, those are some straight up tarantulas crawling around on him.

And at one point, a scorpion.

Oh, yeah, that's right. A scorpion crawls over his hand.

Super late, though. It's like, come on, scorpion.

Yeah.

Didn't you read the schedule for the animal uprising? Arriving late to everything.

He shows up after the cousin slaying has finished.

Yes.

Yeah.

Oh, and all the while, it's great that also the frogs are not getting in on the action. They are not in the Spanish moss, but they're around, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. They're not the direct perpetrators of the violence. Despite the title of the picture and the poster art, which I don't think we've mentioned, the poster art for this film features a frog with a human hand coming out of its mouth, like a giant frog. There are no giant frogs in this movie, but that was the poster. No, but the frogs are normal sized, and they're just in the background watching, perhaps directing. They're kind of like the generals of the animal uprising.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You get the sense that they're the brains behind the operation.

Yeah, and they're not inherently scary animals. Which I think is maybe one of the main flaws of the picture. But on the other hand, it starts to work after a while where it's like the frogs are watching. The frogs are watching. And they're kind of watching on approvingly as if to say, yes, this is good. Everything is going to plan.

Yeah.

That's exactly right. Okay. So then more of the cousin slaying continues. There's another cousin. I think maybe this one is cousin Kenneth. This is the one who's Judy Pace's boyfriend. And he goes to the greenhouse. He's just swaggering around in the greenhouse. I don't remember what he's doing there.

He's maybe like looking for something in the greenhouse.

Oh, I think, what's her name, sent him off to get a particular herb from the greenhouse for something. Like, I don't know if she's going to make a cocktail or something. And so he's in there looking around for it. But after the door didn't close all the way and in come the lizards, especially the Tegu lizards.

Yes.

Which are some, these are some big boys. We'll talk about them in a bit, but they start crawling around everywhere and they start knocking over the chemicals.

Yep. Yep.

That's right. So I can imagine he was in there looking for an herb for a cocktail because grandpa needs his cocktails in this movie.

He does.

There are multiple times that he demands. cocktails. They're really inopportune moments. But the greenhouse death scene is great.

Yeah, because basically they just knock over a bunch of chemicals and then the chemicals overwhelm this particular Crockett kid and he just dies. He just falls out and then immediately- geckos and other lizards are celebrating by climbing on his face. Like clearly they were like, all right, you lay here and then we're going to, our lizard wrangler is going to place some lizards on you and then we're going to shoot again. But now it's time for the, yeah, the invasion, like you say, is really heating up now.

This is where we get one of my favorite scenes where there's an American flag birthday cake out there because it's grandpa's birthday and it's 4th of July and And as the frogs start invading, the frogs are treading on the flag, on the birthday cake.

Yes. And I got to say, that is some stiff icing. Like it really holds up to a big old frog crawling over it. It just makes me think that should be like a, I don't know, a category of directions in how to whip egg whites. So you got your soft peaks, you got your stiff peaks, and then you got your bullfrog supporting peaks.

Yeah. This would indeed make a great wedding cake for anybody who gets married at this location. Get yourself an American flag sheet cake with a fancy cake frog on top of it. Maybe cake cupcakes on top of it.

I don't know.

I'll let the cake people figure it out.

Here comes the frog. So at this point, it seems like people start to kind of take things seriously. They're like, oh, yeah, it looks like people are dying. Sam Elliott starts to lead the charge to investigate what's going on. Meanwhile, Aunt Iris is wandering around in the woods. Of course, you know, she's going to her doom with a butterfly net. We saw her with the butterfly in the bell jar earlier, and I guess she's just going out to catch more.

Yeah, this is, I think, the first real victim in the film where you begin to question whose side you're on. Because, you know, she's sure she catches butterflies, but she's not really bad. She's been nice to everybody.

Well, she did give that really ignorant rant earlier about like, I should be able to pollute however much I want.

Oh, well, that's true.

That's true.

Okay. So maybe she had it coming. At any rate, nature really puts her through the ringer here because she's just one of these scenes where like nature moves in on her and then she's falling. She's screaming. Things are crawling on her.

Yes, though. The funny thing is the majority of her suffering, at least early on in the sequence, seems to be at the hands of vines. And it makes you wonder, okay. So are the plants also taking part in this nature striking back? It's mostly animals, but the Spanish moss descends on one of the earlier cousins. And Iris really, she's like getting choked by vines as she runs through the trees.

Yeah, I think they're in on it. I think this is an all nature uprising.

Yeah, okay. But then after that, it's one of those movies, like the wet pit of death. You know, she falls in a puddle. And you just know that that's a death sentence in a horror movie chase scene in the woods. If you fall in a puddle, it's over. So she's in a puddle. She's all wet. She's got leeches all over her, snakes, frogs, baby alligators. They're just all over the place. And then she gets a fatal snake bite and turns blue instantly, just instantly.

Yeah, as the frogs watch on.

And then with no weight at all, we get Cousin Stuart. I think this might be the Lee Van Cleef cousin. He, you know, he wanders in to see what's going on and he falls prey to a gator attack.

Yep.

We have a gator attack scene and yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty intimidating. Those are intimidating animals. You don't have to, you don't have to, to gussy them up any like the frogs. I mean, the, the gator is instantly intimidating.

So I was wondering about this scene because there is a claim on the IMDB page for frogs. Don't know if it's true, but at least claims that some, some footage in this gator attack scene is, is originally from a Roger Corman movie from 1970 called Bloody Mama. But if that's true, it's integrated pretty well. I couldn't see anything that didn't look like it fit, though obviously you can't see the actor who's wrestling with the gator.

Yeah, there's a website called CaliforniaHerps.com that has a great section of their website devoted to reptiles and amphibians in movies. And they have a write-up on frogs, and I'll get to some of what they have to share later. They highlighted this scene pointing out that it's a real gator. Somebody's wrestling with it, Stuntman. And you can see, if you look closely, that there's a band around the gator's mouth to keep it from actually biting. But they don't mention any connection here with another film, so I don't know.

I don't know, but I'd imagine a lot of herpetologists are not in love with the idea of actually wrestling with a gator for a film production.

Yeah.

But I guess retroactive best wishes to that gator. I hope you were unscathed. But anyway, so back at the house, you've got Karen saying, you know, we've got to get out of here. I think it's clear that people are dying at this point. And she's like, we need to leave this island. And then Grandpa is just straight up.

He's like, I'm not going to let one dead cousin spoil my party. We should carry on with the fun. Somebody make me a drink. We're going to eat our food and it's going to be great.

Yeah, and this is where I think Sam Elliott has to remind him. It's two dead people. Remember the other dead guy, your frog executioner?

Yes.

It's like multiple dead people. And Grandpa's like, still, I'm not having this day ruined.

Right. So Grandpa, he's even more ornery than he was before. And he's like, no, I want to have my birthday. So Sam Elliott and Judy Pace are the main voices of reason here. And then May Mercer and Lance Taylor Sr. join in. I think there is a scene where there's, again, some sort of implied racism on the part of Nasty Grandpa as he sort of demands that everybody else stay on the island. But he tells Bella Harrington, Mabel and Charles, who are all black, that they can leave whenever they want.

So they do leave. And Clint has to powerboat them across the water to the other side. So I was thinking, OK, maybe the three of them successfully escape. I'm not sure. Later we see them being sort of menaced by birds as they are making their escape. And then later we see their abandoned luggage and stuff. So I think it does not bode well for them. But we don't ever see anything happen to them. I guess it's left unclear.

Yeah.

And ultimately I like that better than the movie simply sacrificing them all to the birds.

Yeah.

So, yeah. For what it's worth.

I will say the abandoned luggage and stuff doesn't look good.

No.

No, it does not.

But then also, Clint is out there driving the boat. I think somehow his boat becomes untied from the dock where he has tied it up while taking everybody across the water. So he has to swim back to his boat, but he's not swimming alone. Uh, something swims up on him. I've lost track of all the animals at this point.

Is it a snake? Something swims at him.

Uh, yeah, this may, there are a lot of, there's snakes in the water at this point. They're gators. Um, this is not the alligator snapping turtle scene though, right? That's coming up.

That's on Lynn Borden, who is Clint's wife, who again, too many characters to keep track of. Uh, but she goes out to like watch her Clint being executed in the water by whatever animal it is. And she starts screaming and then she's crawling in the water. And then you see an alligator snapping turtle going after her.

Yeah. Yeah.

And which, of course, is also ridiculous because as neat as alligator snapping turtles are. These are harmless critters. They're not going to come hunt you for sport, certainly in the shallows.

Right.

And then also you see crabs crawling on her butt after she's dead. So maybe the crabs are pitching in as well.

I don't know. I had a question about that because I'm like, this is just crabs doing what crabs do. Like crabs might not have gotten the memo. Like the frogs could be like, thank you, crabs, for joining in the uprising. And the crabs are like, what uprising? We just saw a dead person and we're going to eat them because that's our thing.

Yum.

Yum. But as with earlier, even after all of this death and mayhem, Grandpa Crockett just wants everybody else to stay and keep partying. He's very angry. He's very angry. He's angry about frogs. He's inconvenienced by the deaths of his family members. He demands an old fashioned and Karen makes it for him, which, again, I laughed out loud at.

It's a solid cocktail. So, I mean, if you've got to ride out the end of the world, why not?

But then there's a final escape where Sam Elliott and Joan Van Ark and then the two kids who are not their kids, they're I think Clint and Jenny's kids, they paddle away on a canoe to escape the island. And Grandpa stays behind Ray Milland. He's like, I'm going to party by myself. I'm not leaving.

I will just bitterly drink my cocktails. And eventually he's not even drinking cocktails. He's just sloshing bourbon into a glass. But he's like, nothing can make me leave. I'm staying here to the bitter end. Yeah.

Throughout the rest of the movie, whenever you see Ray Milland, he's just frantically getting more drunk.

Yeah.

But then Sam Elliott is paddling them away on a canoe, and there's a great part where Sam Elliott, you know, he might as well take your shirt off while you're battling some snakes in the water, which he does.

Well, he's wearing all that denim. You don't want it to shrink up on you, I guess. Yeah, that's right.

Okay.

Yeah.

Let the pants stay on.

I guess that's true. I think he needs some equipment to get those jeans off.

Yeah, certainly once they get wet. I'd be concerned it would just cut off all blood flow to his brain.

Yeah, you need some, like a pry bar or something to remove them. But then so there's this final escape sequence where they're trying to get across the water and then get across the land once they get to the other side.

It's pretty good, especially, again, for a movie in which you can't really have too much in terms of human on animal interaction. But it's still pretty good. He fights the fights off the water snakes with a paddle. They make it out to the highway and they're just trying to flag somebody, anybody down. down to get them out of here.

Yeah, it's a Texas Chainsaw Massacre ending, right? It's like escaping, trying to flag down a car that will take them away. And the first car they see stops. This lady stops for the hitchhiker, which is, again, a wet, clean-shaven Sam Elliott carrying a shotgun. And she's like, yes, I'll pull over. Yep, get in the car. And so Sam Elliott and everybody else gets in the car, and then we get a wonderful twist ending here.

That's right. There's a kid in the front seat because, again, this is the 70s. And the kid's like, I just came back from summer camp. Look at this here frog I got and holds this frog back for them to see in the back seat. And the camera zooms in on the frog's face. And we get this awesome freeze frame.

And I think a little bit of that electronic musical zing.

So, again, like with the other characters earlier, we do not see them die. But I think the implication is that even even all these characters are killed as well.

Well, because I don't know why I don't think it's a situation where then that frog like laughs and the car blows up.

But.

It was briefly implied earlier and is definitely driven home here that this is not a regional uprising of nature. This is a global uprising. Like people are vanishing. The people in the car here haven't seen anybody else around like all morning or whatever on their drive. So they're doomed. This is like the end of Stephen King's The Mist, the original short story where the people have escaped the immediate danger, but they're setting off into a world in which there are no longer any safe harbors.

Yes, that's right. You return from the underworld, but you find that the world you know has changed. Right. Yeah, so I think the implication probably is that no one survives. Nature takes back the earth and humanity is crushed below the flipper of the frog.

Right, and this, I should say, this feels like it should have been the end of the film. Yes. But you have to realize that the whole time we've been promised... a scene in which frogs eat Ray Milland. And gosh darn it, this movie is going to give it to us. Yeah, of course.

I mean, he's like he is there to be this nasty grump who will be punished by nature for all of his nastiness. And yeah, if the movie didn't show it to you, it would be a real bummer. So, of course, he's back home by himself, frantically getting more drunk. And then eventually the frogs penetrate his fortress. They're like hopping around in the room with him. The frogs don't really do anything to him. It looks like he dies of a heart attack or something. He just sort of freaks out and he's like, oh, he falls on the floor.

And then there are frogs hopping all over him.

Yep.

And then that's that's the end of the picture. We roll some very brief credits and there's a fun little stinger there at the end. So you got to stay for basically a cartoon frog hops across the screen and he has a human hand sticking out of his mouth, which he then swallows and hops on.

Jeremiah was a bullfrog. It's that kind of thing.

It's kind of a reverse Pink Panther, I guess. Instead of having the cute cartoon at the beginning, you have it at the very end. And also, maybe it's there illegally. So if anybody's like, gosh darn it, this movie poster had a frog eating a person's arm. I didn't see it in the picture. They can say, well, technically, at the very end, if you stay through the credits, you'll get to see this in cartoon form.

Tremendous nature strikes back film.

Yes.

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Now, I want to touch on a little bit more about the frogs and the toads and the various reptiles and amphibians we see here. Again, CaliforniaHerps.com has a great section on their website devoted to herps and movies and indeed a write-up on frogs with photos. And I just want to touch on some of the things they point out. One of the big ones is that they say the animal photography in this film is actually quite good on the whole.

Yeah.

And most of them seem to have been filmed for the movie. So they didn't seem to rely on a lot of stock footage or anything like that. And again, they seem to have avoided the use of puppets and fakes.

Oh, man. That's one of my favorite old things about Ed Wood movies and stuff is that like you'd have a character go into, quote, the jungle in an Ed Wood movie like Bride of the Monster, which is actually just looks like, you know, some trees beside a road. Uh, but so like they get out of their car in the jungle and then you see the actress look up and gasp and then it cuts to not even a, not even slightly a match, but stock footage of like an Eagle and a snake in, in from something else, nature documentary or something.

Yeah. Yeah.

So none of that in here, like I said, it all, it all matches the film quality really well. And yeah, if you, I enjoyed just watching animals in this film, it was weird. It was like going to the reptile house.

Yeah.

So, um, On CaliforniaHerbs.com, I want to read this section where they get into the frogs and the toads. Quote, to the credit of the filmmakers, the frogs and toads we see in the movie are all species that could be found in Florida. Most of them are cane toads, but there are a few leopard toads also thrown in at the end. Unfortunately, they all make the sounds of Pacific tree frogs because that's what frogs always sound like in the movies. Cane toads make a trilling sound and leopard frogs make a chuckling sound. But if the audience heard these sounds, sadly, they wouldn't understand what they are hearing.

It's like how cows don't look like cows in movies. You got to use horses.

Yeah.

So here, this is the audio equivalent of taping a bunch of cats together to create a horse.

Yeah.

Or I think we've talked about this before. What was it we were talking about? You see this occasionally with animal sounds. Oh, I know what it was. It's rattlesnakes. Maybe we didn't talk. Maybe I'm talking about a conversation I had that wasn't on a podcast. But rattlesnakes all make a particular rattling sound when you encounter them in, say, an old Western movie. But if you've been around a rattlesnake, you know that, yeah, there is kind of like that height of the rattle. But there are like some other sounds, other rattling sounds as well that you just don't hear in the movies anymore. And so then having only encountered rattlesnakes in film, if you encounter one in real life, you might not recognize the sound immediately.

Oh, yeah, that's a good point.

What is this weird device I'm hearing?

Yeah.

Anyway, they also point out that cane toads are not native to Florida, but they've been abundant in the state for such a long time. So they're essentially natural residents.

Oh, well, there's another major player in the film that is found in Florida, but it's not native to Florida. It's the tegu lizards or the tegu. That's right. They're like a non-indigenous species. I think they're originally from South America, right?

Yeah. I want to say Argentina.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And yeah, they're quite invasive. And they've even made it up to Atlanta. This is fun. Friend of the show, Mark Mandica of the Amphibian Foundation said, He's been on the local news in the past year here in Atlanta talking about what to do if you see one. And in general, the advice is get somebody who knows what they're doing to come get this big lizard because they're tough critters. In this, Mark says, quote, I would not approach one without the gear that I would need to do so safely. And again, Mark Bandiga is an expert at approaching and in some cases handling critters. reptiles and amphibians.

So he knows what he's talking about. This is not something that the average person needs to get anywhere near.

Right.

Don't go into battle with the tegu.

Yeah. Anyway, go check out CaliforniaHerbs.com if you want more information about the various snakes and other creatures you see in this. I've looked at this website in the past as well. It's just a good place to go if you find some snakes and turtles, what have you, popping up in a film and you're like, I wonder what that is. I wonder if that is even remotely appropriate for the setting or the time period, et cetera.

But so overall, it seems like this movie is unusually accurate, right? In terms of what animals it's portraying is found in Florida.

Yeah, that seems to be the case.

Yeah.

Again, they're not all native creatures of Florida, but the invasive species are ones that were already invasive there at the time and remain invasive to this day. And yeah, so again, there is kind of a natural... quality to this film. Again, these are actual Florida denizens that you're observing as they crawl and hop around, climbing up under the birthday cake and everything.

Amazing. So you will see all of these animals when you get married at this park in Florida.

Yes.

Go to Eden Gardens State Park and demand a swarm of toads and frogs at your wedding ceremony. All right. Well, this is a really fun picture. So some of you might be wondering, how can I see it as well? Well, you can find it on the normal digital sources are all in play here, places to buy or rent it digitally.

I think it's also been illicitly uploaded at some very obvious places and has just for whatever reason been allowed to remain there for years. But I would say you can, I have to stress, you can buy a copy of this for yourself. And if you happen to own a Florida rental property, I demand that you do so. Buy it on DVD and or Blu-ray and stock your vacation rental with this film. Because 88 Films has an edition that even includes an interview featurette with the director. And if that's not good enough, Shout Factory put it out as a double feature with the 1976 Nature Strikes Back picture, The Food of the Gods, which is a Burt I.

Gordon film about giant rats.

Of course, the classic bigger than normal animal movie.

Yes.

So check those out. Those are good ways to pick it up physically. And again, if you want to get it digitally, there are several different ways to do so. It's out there. It's ready for you. It's worth seeing. It's a fun flick. It's definitely a great Florida movie.

Agreed.

All right. We're going to go ahead and close it out there then. But we'd love to hear from you. Have you seen Frogs? Did you see it back in the 70s? What was that like? Were you part of the uprising of Nature Strikes Back pictures? And either way, what's your favorite Nature Strikes Back movie? What kind of animals does it revolve around? We'd love to hear from you.

And in the meantime, you can check out other episodes of Weird House Cinema every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this podcast or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Frogs

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