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Hell Comes to Frogtown is the sort of title so awesome that it can only describe movies which are crazy awesome or completely unwatchable. Let's see which! We start out with a no nonsense narration explaining how BOOM. Post-apocalyptic setting. Now here's Black Tom Sawyer telling someone who is apparently some sort of frog man that he can't have that statue of liberty statuette he's eying and that he's not allowed to own that gun either. Bang. Ribbit. Opening credits. Opening credits with a lot of monochrome and people holding guns and generally homaging 60s cheese really. By the way, this movie is from 1987 apparently, and stars Roddy Piper as someone named Sam Hell who, one assumes, comes to a place called Frogtown at some point in our narrative. You may recognize Mr. Piper from his wrestling career, or from They Live, which is an awesomely weird movie by John Carpenter (who, let's face it, I am way to big a fan of) which basically runs with the premise that old Twilight Zone episodes are the last remaining proof of what the real world was (low budget and black and white) before evil aliens (AKA republicans) started mind-controlling the entire population and projecting vivid colorful imagery all over. Seriously, go watch it. If only for when he can't convince Goliath from Gargoyles to put on the Glasses of True Seeing, leading into the longest contiguous fight scene ever on film.
Anyway though, THIS movie? OK, so, Hell here has been arrested, but they're letting him go on some contingency, because he's one of the only dudes left in the world who hasn't been rendered infertile by fallout. So they give him a special government issue lead codpiece, and send him out into the wilderness with some militant OBGYNs in a bright pink car to go knock up hicks. They also have a huge machine gun mounted on the roof. At this point, think Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death with way more budget and SLIGHTLY less cheese. Anyway, it seems Toady, the evil leader of Frogtown, has kidnapped a bunch of still fertile girls to ransom to this here repopulation project, or possibly just have as a personal harem. Also, Doctor Lady here has some really huge glasses. For Science.
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When they stop for gas, Hell claims he has to go to the bathroom and tries to escape, as goes the trope here. It turns out his ridiculous looking government issued codpiece though (which is to say, it says PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT on his crotch) is essentially one of those exploding head collars. Seriously, what are those originally from? Later that night by the way, Doctor Lady tries to seduce Hell with her ridiculous camo lingerie. As in green military splotchery, with pink frills. This goes nowhere, surprisingly, as it's just a setup to wacky crotch electrification humor. So wow, we just narrowly avoided- oh. There we go. Just after that Gun Lady swings by to seduce him for real, and the curse of Boobs by Paragraph 3 claims yet another victim. This also ends with wackiness by the way.
So now we're just generally getting into travel wackiness. He gets in an argument with Doctor Lady, throws out paperwork, well fine, why don't you just get out right here then! OK! Crotch starts beeping as car pulls away. Eep! Ah, here we go. Some tattered rags wearing girl triggers their proximity alarms, they run her down, and we get the whole escaped traumatized mute girl needs calming down bit. Doctor Lady sedates her, gives her a fertility test, and goes all "OK! Let's you rape her already, it's kinda what we're here for! He's not into this, so Doctor Lady strips down to a less funny set of underwear and starts doing her seductive sitting and squirming dance to help set the mood. Just when I'm starting to fear that I might have accidentally rented porn instead of a nice family movie about mutant frog people, he relents kinda, she puts her clothes back on, and we cut to the next morning where Hell, being all properly MANLY-AWESOME has managed to re-civilize, bathe, properly seduce, sleep with, and presumably impregnate Feral Girl, so she's now fully dressed, calm, rational, and giving out the next plot hook before wandering off towards civilization on foot.
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Next, it's time for Doctor Lady to cosplay as some sort of tattered rags wearing slave girl in chains. Also, have I mentioned recently how this whole crotch rigged to explode concept is getting a lot of humor mileage? Because it is. Anyway, we're temporarily ditching Gun Lady for this bit of subterfuge, and Hell also gives Doctor Lady the traditional glasses removal and hair letting down which must be performed on any nerdy movie girl in order for them to suddenly appear as hot. Then the two wander into what totally looks like the first town from Fallout 3 and wander into some dive bar full of frog people. Hell orders some Frog Booze of which he is Not Fond, but then is spotted by his old Grizzled Old Prospector friend. He's here helping the frog people mine uranium. Oh, and apparently the ridiculous looking Frog Saloon Girl here is their secret spy contact. Now here is a Frog Gangster with Frog Sunglasses and a fez. He offers him some proper beer, "it's only slightly radioactive!" This movie has such a huge Fallout vibe to it at this point.
They negotiate the price for selling Doctor Lady as a dancing slave girl. When they haggle to around "50 lilies" though, a big evil frog dude with a bullwhip who is named Bull and presumably is a bullfrog comes in and more or less steals her to send her to the evil Commander Toady's harem. At this point, it can be said that this movie is not taking itself especially seriously. And... before we move on to the big ol' rescue scene, now that it's just the two of them, Frog Saloon Girl really wants to sleep with Hell. He is not especially on board with this idea, but eventually relents on the condition she wear a burlap sack over her head. Luckily, at this point Doctor Lady has been dragged far enough away for his crotch to start beeping, so he can avoid having to sleep with her, and has a means of tracking where they dragged her off to. This leads immediately to him being captured, so we can proceed to yet another sleazy scene set in a harem.
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Or maybe we're just going to have Bull taking a chainsaw to Hell's crotch. That works too I guess. Oh, and did I mention how any time there's a super sleazy scene in this movie they start playing music that reminds me of similar scenes from the original Star Trek? You know that, Bam, badaladaLAM! Ba dada dada dada... sorta stuff. Anyway, we're kinda cutting back and forth between these. The waving of the sexy veils trips the switch on Doctor Lady's earring, setting the crotch to it's explosion imminent beeping again, I changed my mind, let's try sawing the thing off again... Anyway, codpiece is cut off, then explodes in Bull's hand, Saloony gets stabbed in the following rescue attempt, and Hell is now Determined. As such things go. Oh, and here's some dialog: "DANCE FOR ME!" "The only dance I'm going to do is on your grave!" "DANCE OR DIE!" Oh, and meanwhile, outside, Grizzly fires off a signal flare to summon Gun Lady already.
Oh, and it turns out the "dance of the three snakes" Doctor Lady is being forced to perform is called such because it ends with the arousal of Toady's... ahem, "three snakes." Upon seeing this (mercifully, the audience doesn't), she kicks him in the crotch, and the other crotch, and the other crotch, and then Hell comes in with 2 shotguns to kill all the guards and save her. Well, the guards in that room. There's still the guards to the harem, who are dispensed with further crotch kicks. Then there's the guards outside, who panic at the sight of Gun Lady's gun. And the big fight scene guards, who Grizzly somehow manages to hold off with his flaregun. So... everyone piles into the honestly rather large Big Pink Car, Gun Lady lays down some suppressive fire, and... that's about it? Seriously, this isn't our ending is it, because that sucked for a climax.
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Oh, it seems Grizzly was fatally wounded in the escape. Well, sucks for him, but at least now we get to have some vengeance. Here come some frog people in properly post apocalyptic cars, with tank turrets and random taked on bits! After a bit of shooting and car chasing, our heroes escape the frog people, but are taken hostage by this weirdo with a rocket launcher. He's apparently the REAL bad guy, selling guns to the frog people for uranium, which he sells to corrupt scientists, to build him a nuke, which he plans to use to blow up the government fertility project, because it's run by a bunch of girls and he doesn't like girls being in charge. So... Hell throws a katana at him mid-speech. I wasn't really aware they had a katana on hand prior to this point, but apparently they did. Bad guy somehow survives this, limps off, plays dead, and gets ready to fire his rocket launcher when Hell turns his back, but this does not work out, because you can't really quietly reach for a rocket launcher.
While this goes on, an explosion is heard back where everyone else is. Apparently the Pink Mobile has been destroyed by the frog people who have finally caught up. Hell goes to get dramatic vengeance by blowing up Toady with the rocket launcher, but it doesn't actually work. He then tries to just shoot him with a regular gun, but is a lousy shot. So... then they just end up having a good ol' melee fight on the top of Shatner's Rock. You know the one I mean right? That one cool rock formation that everything uses for scenes like this? Evil Robot Bill and Ted dropped the good versions off it? Yeah, well Hell is trying to do the same for Toady here, but he's trying to drag him down with him. Fortunately, Hell manages to grab his katana and slice his hands off.
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Also, as is surprising to no one with any basic knowledge of how movies work, it turns out none of the girls were actually in the Pinkmobile when it exploded! Despite her being infertile, he'll be starting the celebratory sex-having wih her, before all the other random hot chicks now just kinda in their inventory. Seriously, the random haremettes are such non-characters that after they're rescued they just kinda sit there in the background smiling and not doing anything at all for the rest of the movie.
Now... this movie here? This really proves something about the whole Boobs by Paragraph 3 phenomenon. It just keeps happening. You have a movie which otherwise could probably get by with a G rating (no really, it could), and some point within the first 10 minutes or so, for totally arbitrary reasons, some girl of no particular importance to the plot just takes her shirt off and bobs around for a few seconds, and then we go back to the movie. What the heck is the deal with this? You see it in what? Half the movies I give the Consciousness Stream treatment? I really have to ponder why. I suspect it may have something to do with the practice of creepy producers promising random girls who can't act roles in movies if they sleep with them. Or something. I mean, if I want topless girls, there's plenty of legitimately smutty movies I could watch, and I don't see what anyone gets out of it when you just have the one real briefly. You're just humiliating some poor girl publicly, and cutting prudish types out of your prospective audience. Oh, and it may interest you to know, if I may change the subject, that this movie has a couple sequels, and a remake of sorts the director felt was necessary because studio meddling compromised his original vision. His original vision by the way: Put a bunch of people in frog suits in a post-nuclear wasteland set, turn the cameras on, and just tell everyone to improvise.
