• Directed by Donald G. Jackson and R.J. Kiser
• Written by Randall Frakes
  • Starring
  • Roddy Piper
  • Sandahl Bergman
  • Cec Verrell
  • William Smith
• Produced by Randall Frakes and Donald G. Jackson

If you ask a member of the general public to name a movie starring “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, they’ll most likely answer They Live. Ask them to name a second, and it’ll probably be Hell Comes to Frogtown. (If they can name three or more, they’re no longer members of the general public; they’re one of us.) The main difference will be that, while they very well many have seen They Live at some point (probably on cable), they’ll probably only know Frogtown by reputation — or, minimally, simply by its very memorable title.

Yup, it’s a silly title. And it fits the rest of the movie: unrepentantly silly, and memorable for that.

The stage is set well by the very opening, a voice speaking against a black screen: “In the latter days of the twentieth century, there arose a difference of opinion.” Cue atomic test footage.

Now, I ask you: for those of us who have grit our teeth and stuck it out through scores of poorly made but deadly serious post-apocalyptic flicks, isn’t it refreshing to finally hit one that treats the obligatory opening mushroom cloud as a punchline?

Okay, here’s the setup. It’s ten years after the Big One, and the population is dangerously unproductive. Fertile women are few and far between, but virile men are as rare as hen’s teeth. (Granted, in the mutated future, hens with teeth may be the norm — what do I know?) One of them just happens to be Sam Hellman, aka “Sam Hell” (Piper), an uncouth drifter who’s left a trail of pregnancies behind him. As we meet him, he’s about to get the crap kicked out of him by Captain Devlin (William Smith), a standard-issue fascist law enforcement type whose daughter was Hell’s most recent bedwarmer.

Fortunately for Hell, virility is more important than these petty squabbles, at least as far as the provisional government is concerned, which is why to MedTech nurses — Spangle (Bergman in hideous square-rimmed glasses) and a big black woman whose name I didn’t catch — swoop in and rescue him from Devlin. See, MedTech is the government arm dedicated to rebuilding the species, and since the other arms of government don’t really matter if there aren’t any people… MedTech offers Hell complete amnesty, provided he sign up with them to do his patriotic duty.

They outfit him with a high-tech codpiece (with “PROPERTY OF PROVISONAL GOV’T” stenciled across the front — and I think they mean the contents, not the codpiece) and ship him out on his first mission. It seems that a caravan with fertile women have been captured by the “Greeners,” frog-man mutants who live out on their own reservation. Relations with the amphibians have been strained of late, and there’s rumors that they’ve even been getting illegal arms from somewhere, so asking for the women back is out of the question. Instead, Hell, Spangle, and a beautiful and incredibly dykey gunnery corporal Centinella (Cec Verrell) set out in what looks like a bright pink Studebaker to either rescue the women, and impregnate them later, or, if rescue is impossible, to impregnate them on the spot. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. (Yes, the codpiece will open at the opportune moment — “SPROING-G-G!”)

Now, it may seem that my attempts at humor thus far are largely falling flat. That’s because, folks, all the good jokes were taken by the movie itself. I mean, we’ve got gratuitous Planet of the Apes references right at the start; we’ve got every possible “government equipment” joke; we’ve even got a humming women’s chorus rendition of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” as the Studie heads into the wastelands, for crying out loud! If this movie’s tongue were any more firmly in its cheek it would be poking right through.

On the other hand, too many of the best nickels are spent too soon. The trek across the wasteland gives us time for the obligatory love-hate relationship to grow between the awkward (and bony) Spangle and the really-a-nice-guy-underneath-it-all Hell, including perhaps the most mechanical striptease in the history of cinema. And though you know that Spangle’s glasses are so ugly that they must be a setup for a “take off the glasses and she’s pretty” scene, the payoff is kind of spoiled by the fact that Sandahl Bergman is a dead ringer for Judith Light from Who’s the Boss? — and if there’s any cast member from that show that I want to see in a camouflage bikini, it’s not Judith Light.

Eventually we get to Frogtown, which is naturally an abandoned industrial refinery something-or-other (everybody knows that industrial complexes are the only structures that can withstand an atom bomb, obviously), and the “plan,” such as it is, is for Hell to lead Spangle in on a chain, as if she’s available for sale, thus getting her into the harem of the frog leader, Commander Toty. I probably ought to stop and remark on the frog effects here. They’re not uniformly bad; the mutants run the gamut from subtly froglike to full-blown wide-mouth. Some of the latter are pretty fakey, as they’re sparely-animated cable-controlled masks. But Toty’s head is fully articulated, complete with nictating membranes for his eyes. He also likes to indulge in the Dance of the Three Snakes — but I reeeeeeeeeeally don’t want to dwell on that.

As I said, we’ve already spent our best nickels, and things lose a lot of steam as the jokes run thin. Suffice it to say that there are captures, escapes, unrequited interspecies lust, and an exploding chastity belt. There is not, however, any explanation as to how man-sized amphibians are managing to stay alive in the middle of the desert.

Now, here’s the moment I’ve really been dreading. Because I have to tell you what the biggest single anchor is around this movie’s neck. And may the Cosmos (meaning the totality of the universe, not the twin singing families) have mercy on my soul. Because the single biggest sinkhole here is… Roddy Piper.

Hey! I’m not blaming the guy, okay? But look, this is the first starring role he’d had, and he really hadn’t figured out this whole “performing in front of the camera” thing without clotheslining his costars. He’s, you know, energetic and all — heck, you might even call him “rowdy” — but he’s not that good. And even though They Live was released only a year later, I tend to think that there was a greater time lag between the two shoots, because in Frogtown Roddy has what might be generously called “undefined facial planes” and what might more crassly called “pudgy squirrel cheeks.” Add to this a haircut that was bad even by ’80s standards (compare, again, to They Live, in which his haircut was great for the era, though laughable in hindsight), and you end up with the movie carrying Roddy, rather than the other way ’round.

Roddy! Don’t take it personal! I still love you, man! Hey, everyone’s allowed to suck their first time out the gate — hell, it’s not like this was Hercules in New York! Please don’t hate me!

Anyway. After all this bitching, I still have to say that a post-apoc that even makes the attempt to be clever, instead of unrelentingly grim, is to be commended. There are enough high points in the first half to give the second half sufficient momentum to coast through to the closing credits. (There wasn’t enough momentum to carry over to the two almost-unknown sequels, but that’s fodder for another review.)

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 9
• breasts: 2
• explosions: 10
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • Julius LeFlore (“SquidLips”) did stunts in Star Trek: Insurrection
  • Nicholas Worth (Bull, the one-eyed frog) played “Alien Captain” and “Sorm” on a couple of episodes of DS9, and showed up as “Lonzak” on two episodes of Voyager