Thursday, June 29, 2017

HOP CULTURE

After a run at Harkins Camelview, Brett Haley’s touching drama The Hero, starring Sam Elliot, opens wide on a few more Valley screens this weekend. So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …our honoree this week is the man-eating frog featured in the poster art for 1972’s Frogs


…as well as on the cover of Famous Monsters of Filmland #91…



Elliot played the hunky hero, with the very Sam-Elliot-ish name of “Pickett Smith,” in this silly but nonetheless sort of creepy film. It’s about a murder spree by various crawly creatures against a family of rich Florida cretins led by obtuse patriarch Ray Milland. Even though, as in Aristophanes, they’re the title characters, the amphibians in question (most them actually played by burly cane toads) just aren’t very threatening—all they really seem able to do is stare reproachfully at the humans while spiders, snakes, alligators and the like do the actual killing.

I remember feeling disappointed, as a kid, when I realized that the frog from the ad, capable of swallowing a human whole, wasn’t in the film—not, that is, until the very end of the end credits, when he appears in cartoon form:

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