HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN

"Eat lead, froggies!"

In a post-Apocalyptic Earth of the near-future, the fallout from nuclear war has left the world ravaged by radiation to an extent that two things have happened: most of the population's men have been rendered infertile, and a number of frogs have mutated into power-mad man-sized creatures.

Sam Hell ("Rowdy" Roddy Piper) is a nomadic scavenger who roams the largely deserted wastelands looting and shagging his way through life. Unbeknownst to him, he's left several women pregnant in his wake. Little surprise, then, that his abilities have seen him branded as a wanted man.

Indeed, Sam is swiftly captured and strapped down to a chair in a Med-Tech institute, where he awakens with an explosive chastity belt affixed to his groin. His female captors inform him that he's been arrested for scavenging but they, as medical scientists trying to save the human race from its impending extinction, have the power to wipe his record clean and let him go free.

All he has to do, they tell him, is sneak into a purpose-built hellhole called Frogtown, where the mutants are holed up and holding a group of female women in the hope of breeding a superior race that will help them win their war against ailing mankind.

Once Sam's freed the women, his task is to impregnate each one ... Is he up to the job? Hell, yes!

And so, sassy blonde doctor Spangle (Sandahl Bergman) and machine gun-toting hard chick Centinella (Cec Verrell) are commissioned to chaperone him on his mission. The purpose of the chastity belt, by the way, is to contain his precious seed until he can get to use it on the desired targets. Handily, it's also set to blow up if he should choose to make a bid for escape prior to completing the task at hand...

Once this mismatched trio manage to get through security crossing lines and into Frogtown, this film only gets more bizarre. An army of talking, aggressive man-frogs led by chainsaw-wielding commander Toty (Brian Frank); an aged rebel aptly named Looney Tunes (Rory Calhoun); a bevy of horny women complete with large 80s perms, ready to be boned by Sam; an impromptu forced dance routine for Spangle ... Things get so demented, you might actually forget that there's a purpose to all of this.

Post-apocalyptic thrillers were all the rage in the 80s, of course, following on from the massive commercial and critical success of MAD MAX 2. Whereas most efforts were content in being low-rent rip-offs trading on violence wherever budget and ideas let them down, FROGTOWN went the other way: it's a comedy of sorts, and one that's ripe with deranged notions at that.

Perhaps the most inspired decision that was made by writer-director team Randall Frakes and Donald G Jackson was the casting of former pro-wrestler Piper. He's not a great actor by any stretch and his physique is hardly on a par with the toned sportsmen of today, but there's a cheeky, knowingly out-of-his-depth charisma to the fella that is instantly likeable. It doesn't hurt him any that virtually all of his lines are wise-cracks.

Women are fairly represented in the screenplay too, with Bergman and Verrell standing out as the strongest, most memorable characters. They both get to kick ass, as well as throw out a few funny lines and tear our gormless hero down a peg or two when it counts the most.

The frog FX work is surprisingly good, with animatronic facial muscles and puppeteering bringing them to life in impressive fashion. Everything else in the film - stunts, set design, costumes - looks cheap and unconvincing in comparison. Not that it matters: there's a gleefully Z-grade abandon to proceedings that seems to be daring you to nit-pick. The script's daft? Sure it is, the actors are virtually winking at you throughout. The action is clumsy and corny? Of course, what do you want from a film where the most fertile man in the world has to fight of mutant frogs?

If there is room for complaint in a film like HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN, it's that it doesn't fully live up to its cult aspirations. With such an outlandish premise and such a cheap look, it's almost disheartening to discover the filmmakers were reluctant to push their film into R-rated territory. There's precious little nudity, nigh-on no gore and profanity is kept to a bare minimum.

I'm not suggesting that these things are required to make a good film. But, when you stumble across a movie such as FROGTOWN where the premise has such great potential for exploitation, and there's precious little of technical merit to fall back on, you do tend to think the co-directors missed a trick or two here.

Still, while the film may feel a little restrained as a whole, it's still filled with enjoyably strange (I believe the modern term is WTF) moments and generally good-natured tone that is hard not to like.

Unbelievably, it spawned two sequels.

As with their other release of the same week, HELLGATE, Arrow Films Video are unleashing FROGTOWN as a two-disc blu-ray and DVD combo pack, in a strictly limited run of just 1000 copies.

The DVD was made available for review purposes.

Picture quality is very impressive. The film is presented uncut in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio and has been enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Very little debris is evident on the original negative elements which have been used for this new transfer.

The film’s cheap, colourful set designs are well served by a vibrant palette, while detail is strong and blacks remain reliable for the duration of playback. Fans will be delighted by this presentation.

English audio is provided in its original 2.0 mix and is extremely clean.

Arrow’s disc opens to an animated main menu page. From there, a scene-selection menu allows access to FROGTOWN via 12 chapters.

We also get treated to some very tasty extra features.

The first of these is "Grappling with Green Gargantuans", a 21-minute interview with Piper. Despite his speech suggesting that his former career has left him somewhat punch drunk, the leading man comes across as an affable, larger-than-life personality who can look back on the film with a lot of wry laughter. He’s honest enough to speak about his own shortcomings as an actor, and how he got on with the actresses on set. He confesses to not recognising Calhoun while working with him, and offers a funny anecdote about the time his wife – "the poisonous dwarf", as he calls her – visited him on the shoot. Piper’s good company and this is undoubtedly the disc’s highlight.

"Creature Feature Creator" spends 15 minutes with Steve Wang, the man behind the film’s cheesy frog FX. Acting as designer and puppeteer on the creatures, he also remembers the shoot as being tough but a lot of fun.

"Amphibian Armageddon" finds aging actor Frank looking good for his years and chatting chirpily about his time spent as the chief villain of FROGTOWN.

The film’s original theatrical trailer is a breathless 107-second affair, complete with the deep male voiceover that seemed to adorn all trashy flick previews in the late 80s.

We also get an extended version of Piper’s introductory scene. Although clearly cut for reasons of pacing, it adds reason to his first lines of dialogue in the finished film. Alas, this scene is sourced from ropy VHS and pillarboxed to boot.

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN certainly is a bizarre proposition, from start to barmy finish. In a year that's already filled with a slate of eclectic forthcoming releases, this may well be the strangest thing Arrow are set to release during the next 12 months.

By Stuart Willis