Review #346: Frogs (1972)
October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #19 - Frogs (1972)
I remember watching this film back in like 2006, after my wife and I started our weekly Bad Horror Movie Night. This was one of those movies that we'd seen sitting on the shelf at the local Blockbuster, and I thought, "A movie about frogs? That might be fun!"
Spoilers: it wasn't.
Frogs really has basically nothing to do with frogs (and there certainly is never a point where a person gets eaten by a giant frog, as seen in the poster). In Frogs, Sam Elliott plays Pickett Smith, a photojournalist who is out in a canoe taking photos of the local wildlife when a couple bumbling rich socialites nearly kill him with their speedboat. To apologize, they bring Smith back to their family's private island, where their maids and butlers are getting ready for the elderly patriarch's birthday celebration the next day (July 4th). The patriarch, Jason Crockett, is in a bad mood because he's been noticing a lot of frogs in the area lately; he's sent one of his servants to go out on the island and lay down poison and traps for them but the servant hasn't returned. Over the course of the film it becomes apparent that nature is fighting back against mankind, and one by one the Crockett family is killed off by various creatures, and the protagonist Smith escapes the island with what few survivors he can. And then the movie is over.
So, the main issue I had with this film back in the 2000s was that we tried watching it, and found it unbearably boring. This time around I thought, "Surely I just wasn't paying full attention or something, so I missed the details. Surely this film is good, if it's persisted this long." But no, it was indeed unbearably boring in 2025. I even played the movie at 1.25x speed and it still felt like all of the dialogue and pauses and even the action were slowed down.
The secondary issue I had is that despite being called "Frogs", frogs don't do a damn thing in this entire movie. Nobody in the film actually gets killed by a frog- people are killed by snakes, spiders, a snapping turtle- one guy is even killed when a lizard knocks a bottle of poison gas (?) off a greenhouse shelf and he breathes it in. (Apparently, they shot a scene where a butterfly kills someone by luring them into quicksand, but that was decided to be too silly so they had her get bitten by a snake instead.) The closest any frogs come to harming anybody is in the final scene, when patriarch Crockett seemingly has a heart attack and falls out of his wheelchair, and then a bunch of frogs climb on top of him. But despite the frogs not actually harming anyone throughout the film, the characters all treat these frogs as if they're a terrifying threat. Characters will need to run through a field to get to safety and they'll be told "Watch out for the frogs!" despite the fact that... like, frogs can't hurt you, right? Maybe if you eat one of those bright-colored poisonous ones, but that's not what we're dealing with here. A bullfrog can't kill you. I don't even think it can hurt you. But the entire movie, people are saying "Oh no, the frogs!" as if that's supposed to make them scary.
Also, tying together both of these issues is how absurdly padded out this movie is. Every thirty seconds, no matter what is going on in the scene, the movie will just cut to some footage of animals (usually frogs) doing animal stuff. Characters having a conversation? Cut to footage of a snake in a tree. Characters running towards a boat? Cut to footage of some frogs climbing on each other. I swear if you were to cut out every shot of an animal that the characters never interact with, you'd remove like 40 minutes of this film's runtime. It seriously feels like there just wasn't enough footage to justify the price of a movie ticket, so they shot a ton of stock footage of various animals and then inserted it literally anywhere there already existed a cut in the film. It makes the movie drag so much more than it would have otherwise, and it doesn't help it seem scary when most of these frogs just look so darn cute!
I really have to wonder how self-aware this movie was. Like, they realized frogs aren't scary, right? They realized that even if frogs WERE scary, the frogs in this movie don't do anything, right? They realized that they called the movie "Frogs" despite the fact that 100% of the confirmed deaths in this film are perpetrated by other animals, right? But if the movie was made as a joke, I feel like they forgot to make it funny or entertaining. It's just a long, boring slog from the five-minute opening scene with no dialogue to the ending shot of frogs jumping on the old man's corpse. I'm really not sure what else to make of this film.
Obviously this is an "eco-horror" film, where the villain isn't a slasher or demon or whatever, but nature itself. I get that. I get that it's meant to portray mankind as the true evil, and we're getting what's coming to us. It's clearly taking after Hitchcock's The Birds, and is probably a direct predecessor to other infamous movies like Birdemic: Shock and Terror. But this one just falls so short of the target (and unlike Birdemic, it's not even so bad it's fun to laugh at) that I didn't enjoy it one bit.
Anyway, I don't recommend watching this one. If you feel the need, crank up the speed as high as you can. It'll be over faster that way.
Overall Rating: 2/10 Inexplicable Jars of Poison Gas
I'm Not the Only One: Apparently Ray Milland, who played the patriarch Jason Crockett, hated this movie so much he quit a few days before he was set to be done filming. Most of his death scene at the end had to be filmed with a body double. I don't blame him!
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