There really should be a word for media that arrives first, yet can only be explained by comparing it to something that came later and was far more popular. Today’s subject, Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988), falls squarely into that category. The easiest way to describe it is as a Duke Nukem 3D movie made nearly a decade before that game even existed.
Released at the peak of the Road Warrior copy-and-paste gold rush, Hell Comes to Frogtown goes off the rails even by those standards. Nuclear war – the ultimate cockblocker – has tanked human fertility and all but destroyed human society. Those who are fertile are treated as prizes commodities by the somewhat authoritarian government – the women, as ever, being held something on a pedestal and the men treated as perpetual fucking machines.
Elsewhere, deep in the wasteland reside the mutant frogmen who have been banished to the eponymous Frogtown. The frogmen are these rubbery abominations that look like some Farscape rejects. They have a lust for human women and absolutely no chill about it. And if you’ve seen their women, you’d understand why.
Enter our protagonist Sam Hell (Roddy Piper), a nomadic scavenger with balls of steel. As one of the few fertile men, he’s considered a stud by government. A bit like how it is with a prized horse. But instead of some middle class woman wanking a horse to completion in a stable – and trying not to think of daddy – Sam wanders the wastes and leaves pregnant women in his wake, like a randy version of David Carradine in Kung Fu.
The government are serious about their human resources and keep little Sam under lock and key, using an electric codpiece that also monitors his vitals and shocks him if he gets out of line. Upon learning that the frogs have kidnapped a bunch of fertile women, however, the government send Sam to infiltrate Frogtown. He’s to rescue and then impregnate the women.
You’d think the government wouldn’t want to risk Sam and his super sperm. Surely, he’s better suited getting warmed up back at HQ whilst someone with fried nads goes in. Unless, the implication is that Sam is so virile he can blast rope with the raw power of Rambo destroying the command centre with the M60. I don’t even know why I’m thinking so hard about this film – no one involved did!
Sam, being a man and therefore untrustworthy, is accompanied by nurse Spangle (Sandahl Bergman) and discount Vasquez (Cec Verrell). The plan is simple, Sam is to infiltrate the Frogtown, with a bondage gear clad Spangle in tow, as some kind of slaver. And I just want to say, poor Bergman – the pipeline from Conan the Barbarian to this and Red Sonja is tragic.
Naturally, things don’t go too well inside Frogtown which is some kind of industrial cyberpunk settlement where jazz singers and brutal warlords buying new “wives” stand side by side. Sam is knocked out and left to the mercy of one of the frogwomen (who obviously wants to bone him, like every woman in this film) before being tortured (including having his chastity device gone at with a chainsaw).
The frogman who tortures Sam (played by Nicholas Worth) gets the best line of the movie, by the way. Or at least the best delivery. You know the one, if you’ve seen it.
Spangle is forced to be a sort of go-go dancer for her new master, the frog warlord Commander Toty. She undergoes the so called Dance of the Three Snakes and decides to go full ham, with a dance that’s somewhere between Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks. Though no-one could possibly be into that, it turns out that Toty’s into that. So we get to see shots of him with his o-face like that Vince Mcmahon meme.
As it turns out the three snakes refers to Toty’s three dicks. And Spangle’s just charmed them, so to speak. God, this film’s like Planet of the Apes if you replaced all the apes with things that look and act like Harvey Weinstein. Fortunately, Sam manages to escape and come and save the day. He bursts down the door and delivers his memorable “eat lead, froggies” and starts spraying.
From there the film plays out like the standard sort of fair, as Sam and Spangle rescue the haram of women and fight their way out. This cumulates in a final act that wants to be like The Road Warrior but it has a fraction of the budget, skill, and vehicles. It ends with the heroes escaping and on the note that yes, he’s going to bang every single one of those women. Poor bastard.
And that’s Hell Comes to Frogtown. The tone is pure late-’80s trash. It pretends that it wants to say something about gender roles, power structures, and reproductive control. But really, it wants an excuse to parade leather bikinis, dominatrix energy, frog mutants, and cheap action sequences across the screen.
What really carries Hell Comes to Frogtown, though, is Piper. He treats the material with exactly the right balance of sincerity and contempt. He’s clearly aware that the film is nonsense, but he never plays it like a joke. If you’ve seen They Live, you already know exactly what kind of energy he’s bringing. He’s a cocky, sarcastic, macho bastard. Piper’s comic timing, eye-rolling exhaustion, and physical presence make the movie far more watchable than it has any right to be.
At start of the review, I described this as being basically a Duke Nukem 3D movie (before that was a thing) and I stand by that. They both have a premise of earth’s women being captured by non-human entities (aliens in Duke’s case) and the protagonist being the only dude bad enough to save them. Both stories feature a hero who saves humanity through raw sexual potency and one-liners. And both stories feature a generally fuckabouty tone that has some really dark aspects if you stop to think about it for a second.
But the most important thing is this – is Hell Comes to Frogtown good? In the traditional sense, absolutely not. Is it entertaining? Undeniably. And if you think otherwise, you can shut your hole.
Hell Comes to Frogtown is trash cinema in its purest form: dumb, sweaty, aggressively weird, and powered almost entirely by confidence. It’s the kind of movie that could only exist in the late ’80s, starring a pro wrestler at peak charisma, shot by people who never once asked “should we?” Only “how fast can we do this before the coke wears off?”
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