aka Croaked: Frog Monster From Hell

• Produced and directed by Bill Rebane
• Written by Lyoma Denetz
• Starring
  • Paul Callaway
  • Richard Lange
  • Gelnn Scherer
  • Brad Ellingson

I believe it was in the early ’70s that Congress finally made it law: Every state of the union must produce a “local color” style creature feature, be it lake monster, swamp creature, or Bigfoot cousin. In 1975, Wisconsin fulfilled their patriotic duty with this mostly-forgetten flick.

The entire movie, more or less, is a flashback story told by Kelly, a guy in his late twenties with a bad ’70s haircut, to his wife/girl/significant other in a cabin on the island he grew up on. [Cue flashback harp runs.]

See, Kelly and his dad were practically isolated on this remote island, seeing how Dad was a Ranger and all. (Oddly enough, when Kelly was eight years old, everyone had bad ’70s hairstyles, and he still has one when he grows up. Talk about bad karma.) The only other people on the island that summer were a crew of three loggers (or are they?), and the crazy half-Indian hermit who’s lived here for decades. But when Kelly found an interesting fossil (in the topsoil, no less), a scientist and her teenaged niece come out to look around from “The University” (according to B-movies, there’s only one university in each state — perhaps in the whole world).

The scientist Elli immediately shows us that the scriptwriter didn’t know beans about anything not found in the local pet store when he has her say about the fossil, “It’s from some kind of aquatic reptile, like a frog but much larger.” Gee, I just can’t picture that, since frogs aren’t like ANY sort of reptile!

Anyway. What the loggers are really looking for is gold. Seems that there’s an old Indian legend about Rana, the local lake god, who liked to be worshipped with chickens and little yellow nuggets thrown into the lake. Their scuba diving has disturbed something mean…

All right. It’s not original, not even a little bit, but there’s something quite entertaining about it. Some bits are actually quite good (the deftly understated crush eight-year-old Kelly has on the teenaged niece), some are incidentally beautiful (the green mossy forest — ya don’t get those filming in California, brother!), and most are laughably ludicrous (like the fact that grown-up Kelly keeps stopping his story to make out for about 30 seconds before his woman says, “But what happened then?”).

At least they follow the #1 low-budget creature feature rule: DO NOT show the creature until the latest possible moment. a good thing, too — this monster costume was a green-spattered wetsuit with a frog mask. I mean, it made the costume in the first Swamp Thing movie look like CGI from a $200 million summer blockbuster.

Other things of note (or not):

- This videocassette originally came in an oversized box. That’s usually the first clue.

- Scuba guy #1 makes a sleazy pass at the teenaged niece. Whaddaya wanna bet Scuba guy #1 needs to check his life insurance policy?

- Music, Ye gods, the music. Between lyrical guitar bits and incidental music that seemed swiped from The Andy Griffith Show, plus ’70s rock instrumentals with guitars that go “waka-waka-waka-waka,” the whole soundtrack is the oldest fossil in the movie. (When one logger dies in slo-mo, the music we hear is — I’m being honest here — Swan Lake. Do the ballet of the killer frogmen with me!)

- Funniest scene: the old hermit is muttering to himself as he puts a chicken in the pot on the stove, drinks, pours some whiskey in the stewpot. In the background, his pet goat totters around the room unattended, tries to climb onto his bed and tips over a crate.

Hey, it ain’t art, but it… well, it ain’t art.