Review #903: 'Frogs' (1972)

Despite the poster depicting a frog with a human hand hanging out of its mouth, American International Picture's Frogs is not about giant frogs. Instead, this is a nature-gone-mad movie featuring about 500 bullfrogs, along with an assortment of other creepy critters (lizards, snakes, spiders, birds, alligators) who begin to terrorise a wealthy family and an ecologist who happens upon them. The frogs of the title are a merely an annoyance and a constant presence, driving the residents of the island mansion on which the film takes place insane with their constant croaking.

Photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) is taking pictures of the local wildlife in a swamp located near to the estate of the wealthy Crockett family. Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke), the young and drunken heir to the family inheritance, accidentally knocks Pickett off his canoe and into the water with his speed-boat, and so takes him back to the mansion for a change of clothes. There, he meets the grumpy and wheelchair-bound patriarch Jason (Ray Milland), who voices his distaste for the slimy inhabitants of the surrounding fauna. Pickett discovers the body of a man sent by Jason to spray pesticide, and soon the Crockett's and their employees find themselves under threat from a variety of murderous beasties.

Although the promise is utterly ludicrous, Frogs is played with a straight-face for the most part, and is elevated by decent performances from Milland and Elliott - the former of which was a regular on the B-movie circuit at this point in his career and the latter showing us what he looks like without his trademark moustache. But the animal attacks are few and far between, clumsily edited and failing to generate anything in the way of jumps or scares. The majority of the film consists of the family complaining about the frogs while Jason groans and disapproves at everything, ignoring both the warnings of Pickett and the blatant unnatural occurrences happening all around them. For a film about killer frogs, it's better than it has any right to be, but this is tedious stuff for the majority of its running time.


Directed by: George McCowan
Starring: Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie

Review #435: 'The Losers' (1970)

The biker film was a staple of American exploitation cinema in the late 1960's, culminating in the "generation defining" studio funded classic, Easy Rider (1969). What we have here is somewhat of a genre mash up, placing a bunch of Californian bikers in the midst of an "exotic" war zone. Five gang members, led by Link (William Smith), are employed by the CIA, sent into the heart of darkness in Vietnam, to rescue a captured agent, Chet Davis (played here by director Jack Starrett - who most will recognise as the vicious police officer, Galt, from First Blood (1982)).

The first hour of the film is spent with the gang as they integrate into a small village, basically brawling, fucking, drinking and fomenting relationships with the all-too-easy ladies. It is a completely ludicrous premise; OK so perhaps this gang of low-life's were more expendable than the troops being sent out daily, but it is hard to believe. That being said, this is exploitation cinema at its most ridiculous.

The action accelerates in the last reel, as the bikers infiltrate a camp, their bikes armed to the teeth, but the action is repetitive, and with little merit: Bikes jump, huts blow up.  Besides this though, some of the characters are likable enough, with their dialogue of cliched, counter-cultural hyperbole, but it doesn't really save a pretty tedious affair - perhaps the trailer was exciting, so maybe you should just see that. Like all exploitation films of the time that were set in exotic climates, this was of course filmed in the Philippines (where filming is cheap!).


Directed by: Jack Starrett
Starring: William Smith, Bernie Hamilton, Adam Roarke
Country: USA

Rating: **

Marc Ivamy