‘Hell Comes to Frogtown’: the ultimate B-movie bonanza
Certain movies feel predestined to become cult classics, whether through the sum of their creative parts, the outlandishness of their conceits, or a combination of both. Hell Comes to Frogtown firmly ticks each box, and the end result is unashamedly glorious trash.
Directed by schlock merchant Donald G. Jackson – who boasts The Demon Lover, Kill, Kill Overkill, Rollergator, and Guns of El Chupacabra in his filmography – the screenplay was co-written by James Cameron regular Randall Frakes, who’d work with the box office conqueror on Xenogenesis, Battle Beyond the Stars, Aliens, and Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Arriving in a banner year for its leading man, Hell Comes to Frogtown landed months before John Carpenter’s They Live, although it remains entirely up for debate as to whether Sam Hell or John Nada wins the award for ‘Best-Named Character Played by Roddy Piper in 1988’.
Throw in Golden Globe-winning Conan the Barbarian and Razzie-nominated Red Sonja star Sandahl Bergman, an endearingly threadbare budget, and the unbridled nonsense of a post-apocalyptic world infested by sterile humans, mutant amphibians, and government-sponsored codpieces, the end result was never going to be anything less than anarchic nonsense.
There are two ways to view Hell Comes to Frogtown, and it’s entirely dependent on how far any person’s mileage for B-tier insanity goes. Is it a well-made film? No. Well-directed? No. Well-written? Absolutely not. Well-acted? Piper, maybe, the rest of the ensemble less so. In short, it’s not very good. On the other hand, that’s exactly what makes it so wonderful.
After all, where else is anyone going to find a protagonist with a fondness for double denim traipsing through the ruins of a post-nuclear hellscape who earns the attention of the authorities by way of his powerful seed, which in turn emboldens them to affix a device to his crotch monitoring his sexual magnetism and deploy him to rescue captive fertile women from an amphibian stronghold so he can liberate and impregnate them? The answer, dear reader, is nowhere else.
Well, except maybe sequels Return to Frogtown and Max Hell Frog Warrior, but they’re best avoided. However, for the midnight madness crowd who like their sci-fi action comedies to be as bizarre as humanly – or inhumanly possible – there are many good reasons why the original has stood the test of time as a demented delight.
Most importantly, everyone involved knows exactly how ridiculous the movie they’re making is, and they lean into it. Every couple of scenes, it feels as though any given actor is moments away from staring directly into the camera and winking, and it wouldn’t even be much of a transgression if they did.
It’s that kind of film and one that can’t come recommended enough for those moments when the brain wants to watch a gratuitous slab of nonsense without ever being considered for a switch into the ‘on’ position.