HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN (1988)

HELL COMES TO FROGTOWN (1988)

Tagline: A new breed of enemy has taken over the world... Sam Hell has come to take it back.

I gotta tell you, you are one weird dude.

(Action, Comedy, Weird Stuff) [R]

Oh man, there are b-movies and then there are b-movies. In this one, one of the last men on earth that isn’t infertile is “Hell” (yeah that is his name because his parents are idiots). He becomes a prisoner of the government and is taken to “Frogtown” in an effort to rescue a group of women that can also have children from a mutant race of humanoid frogs. To complicate things both the women in charge of the mission also want “Hell” to sleep with them. He can’t escape because they have him wearing a bomb he can’t get off. Can “Hell” repopulate the world in time to win a coming “population” war with the mutants?

First off, I actually liked Roddy Piper(who plays “Hell”) as an actor. I thought he was pretty great in THEY LIVE, so him being in this movie is actually what drew me to it. Heck knows that it wasn’t this crazy plot that sounds like a horny 13-year-old came up with it.  

Production-wise for as cheaply as this movie was made the practical effects and even the design on the mutant frogs isn’t that bad, they look sufficiently creepy and weird, having said that outside of the look of the frogs this movie is pretty lame. The camera work is bad, the sets are bad, the actual script is horrifyingly bad for the most part. I will say that “Hell” actually gets some pretty funny lines. The entire middle section of the movie is just a bunch of terrible augments between “Hell” and Spangle (played by Sandahl Bergman who is probably best known for playing Valeria in CONAN THE BARBARIAN) and Centinella ( played by Cec Verrell who was probably best known for the TV series “Supercarrier”). You would think that if the government was going to kidnap someone they would pretty much know everything there was to know about that dude. “Hell” has a dead daughter in this and supposedly “doesn’t care about anything”. If that was the case, why does he care if he’s been kidnapped by two women and is on his way to rescue more women? 

Acting-wise I am not going to say this was terrible. The actors were just given an amateur script. While the cheese level is at 100 for this movie, but it wasn’t the fun kind of cheese, it was the boring moldy cheese you cut off the rest of the block and toss out. Oddly we even got a FROGTOWN II, but Roddy Piper wisely was too busy wrestling to make the movie. Even though he was the best part of this movie, I would have felt bad for him to have to wade through another one of these. 

I get that a lot of people consider this one of the 80’s cheesy must-see movies, but there are very few moments in this movie that were actually any good even from a “that’s some awesome cheesy stuff” standpoint. I can’t in good faith give this thing anything other than a 2 out of 7 even though it's a bit of a cult classic, but hey, if you are looking for some b-movie crap and just happen to like frogs, this might be your thing. 

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