Review of Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988) by King L — 04 Aug 2015

With the antics of Roddy Piper being unforgettable in John Carpenter's They Live, I had hopes for more fun cheap 80's thrills in Hell Comes to Frogtown.

With a story like Hell Comes to Frogtown, it could not more explicitly be a clearly masculine fantasy. I mean, it's a post-apocalyptic science fiction thriller set in a world run by women on a war against anthropomorphic frog creatures while the protagonist is a male hero whose value lies in his strength as a tough guy and as a fertile male. His journey takes him into Frogtown with a codpiece reminding us just how important his penis is, and his two female soldier companions who have been "trained in seduction techniques" attempt to arouse him at various points. As a pre-pubescent teenager of the 1980's, I would have considered Hell Comes to Frogtown a masterpiece, and it is explicitly clear how esoteric the audience for the film is. I fit into that demographic on many levels, but at the same time I can easily acknowledge precisely how shallow the film is and how the storytelling is largely insufficient.

Story is hardly to be expected in Hell Comes to Frogtown, and that's a good thing because there is little in the way of just cause to explain the existence of the antagonistic amphibians at the heart of the story. My guess would be that Donald G. Jackson and Randall Frakes were inspired by playing Battletoads and watching the scene at Jabba's Palace from Star Wars Episode VI : Return of the Jedi and based the entirety of Frogtown off that. These elements do not integrate well as they combine intended effects of arousal and disgust with focus too heavy on the latter. But of course, the film is made in the Donald G. Jackson's iconic style of "Zen Filmmaking" in which no scripts are used to produce the film. It is pretty damned obvious when you look closely considering that the story is ridiculous while the dialogue seems thrown in there out of nowhere with sporadic use of 80's one liners which are rarely ever effective unless it's because they're bad that they become laughable. In that sense, there is occasionally a sense of entertainment value stemming from the fact that aspects of Hell Comes to Frogtown encourages a "so bad it's good" feeling. However, there isn't enough ot it to carry the film through all its 88 dull minutes.

Director Donald G. Jackson is often referred to in the media as the "Ed Wood of the video age". This is all too clear in Hell Comes to Frogtown because it is bereft of so many things required to constitute a genuine piece of cinema. The issue predominantly lies in the fact that as a guilty pleasure, Hell Comes to Frogtown spends too much time reminding us of the incompetence at the heart of the story and not delivering the action goods. After one character is killed in the intro scene, there is no action in Hell Comes to Frogtown for a whopping 63 minutes. This constitutes over two thirds of the 88 minute long film, and even when the action does finally appear it is brief, cheap and succumbing to the rest of the production issues. These include the conventional style of the film and the exceedingly poor lighting which buries the experience into monotonous monochrome. The production values make the climactic fight scene between Sam Hell and "Toady" reminiscent of the time that Captain James T. Kirk fought the Gorn in the Star Trek episode "Arena" which is largely considered by many to be one of the worst fight scenes of all time. There is slightly more value in what Hell Comes to Frogtown offers and the efforts of Roddy Piper in this scene have some value to them, but it is far from entertaining.

Even the use of nudity is sporadic. It is put into scenes of a ridiculous nature and there are attractive women during it, but it only predominantly occurs on the journey to Frogtown as an attempt to disguise the fact that nothing else is going on in the story. It may distract viewers with the most minimal expectations, but after all of that there is little in the way of nudity for the rest of the film. Ultimately, for a film which boasts such a ridiculous masculine fantasy as its central plot, there is nowhere near enough testosterone to even give most viewers a semi.

The production values of the film do not even pretend that they matter. In a case worse than when the All Effects Company took over for Jim Henson's Creature Shop in providing the animatronics for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, the prosthetic designs for the amphibians of Hell Comes to Frogtown are pathetic. Either they are obviously humans or the costumes are so heavy that the mouths do not move in sync with the voices with the slightest. And though the film pretends to be a large scale story, it is all too clear how cheap Hell Comes to Frogtown is based on the limited collection of characters and settings in the story. All in all, you couldn't expect much from a film titled Hell Comes to Frogtown or for it to be the slightest bit convincing, and so you get what you pay for.

In They Live, the cheese 1980's gimmicks of Roddy Piper worked significantly better because that was a film which was both gimmicky and yet legitimate. Hell Comes to Frogtown is just cheap, and it brings out the charms of Hulk Hogan in him. Still, considering the nature of the film around him this actually works to the benefit of the story because it brings comic value to the film which is so terrible that it becomes funny. But the problem is that he can work with the right dialogue if it is tightly written, and yet the Zen Filmmaking style of Hell Comes to Frogtown requires him to improvise which turns into footage best written off as WWF outtakes.

Sandahl Bergman doesn't have much value either, with the exception of her minor sex appeal. It's a shame considering she is a Golden Globe Award winning stuntwoman who has a cult legacy for appearing in Conan the Barbarian.

So Hell Comes to Frogtown delivers the promises of its title because the feature is boring as hell, with Roddy Piper's cheesy gimmicks unable to transcend the shortage of action and lack of guilty pleasure fun.