In a distopic, post nuclear war world; The male population has been reduced by 67%, and what men survived are almost entirely sterile. As such a medically driven Matriarchy was formed with one sole purpose. Get as many women pregnant as quickly as possible to help rebuild the population and get back to building weapons to take out the enemy. Oh…and for some reason the radiation has created a large number of anthropomorphic human frog creatures who roam the wastes looking for sex slaves.

Enter ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper as the most fertile man on the planet, captured by scientists, he’s assigned a dangerous mission, resuce a handful of VERY fertile women from the clutches of a frog overlord and knock them up by any means necessary.

This. is ‘Hell Comes to Frogtown’ and I was absolutely NOT expecting the tone this film was putting down.

Its pretty much a parody of movies like ‘Mad max’ or ‘Steel Dawn’ but whereas those kinds of films often attract laziness and direct parody. ‘Hell’ strikes out on its own, creating a unique and interesting take on the post apocalypse scenario thats both tonally VERY tongue in cheek and dark humour, while also not being afraid to get kind of serious in places.

We have a rock solid three act structure with some seamless transitions between the acts, characters are well balanced, have a decent level of complexity about them and have a nice level of charisma to them. The pacings pretty solid, with only slight slowdown in the second half of the 2nd act to really flag up.

Its a script thats punchy, zippy, a bit out there but most importantly, entertaining without dumbing down or punching down on its topic. If anything I do feel it could have stood to go even MORE out there than it ultimatley did. But it’s grimey and tonally playful look and feel were endearing to say the least.

The directions pretty rock solid too, no major complaints from me. I do feel that they undersell the frog humans in this a little bit, I think they dont nearly look as slimey or gooey as they could have looked. But I think our directing duo have done a good job of realising this distinct vision and have utilised the cast and crew well in pulling together a decent interpretation of the script.

The cine is absolutely to studio grade, though I do wish it could have gone a bit more out there with interesting shot composition or with the effects shots. Particularly during the fight scenes where Piper gets absolutely trashed and they make a decent deal to show off the heavy hits and the bloody gory nature of his encounters. But the frog costumes dont get roughed up in any way shape or form, and in fact, the one or two times they do see a bit of action, it becomes painfully obvious that they’re just foam rubber costumes.

That being said, its still a visually interesting, if not a tad underwhelming film visually, and the edit really goes above and beyond in deliviering us the tightest possible edit that absolutely doesnt overstay its welcome.

The performances are just the right side of campy with Roddy Piper absolutley shining through with charisma and great physicality. Im almost kind of upset that our female leads in this dont actually get to realistically do all that much.

They spend a good chunk of the film fawning over Piper and they do get a few interesting lines. But ultimately they all more or less are ‘Damzel in Distress’ architypes and the one woman in this who DOESNT conform to that, is largely left out of the third act ‘big fight’ scenes, and when she does turn up, she doesnt get to do much. I just kind of wish they were a bit more intricately worked into this thing. As, as it stands, they’re fine enough…but dont get to do much.

Chuck in a pretty killer soundtrack and I honestly thought ‘Hell comes to Frogtown’ was an absolute hoot! definitely worth checking out and I think it’d probably pair up quite well with something like ‘Cherry 2000’ to see the other side of ‘one gender is gone, the other must learn to love again.’ or as possibly the best indirect sequel to ‘Threads’ i’ve ever seen.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hell-comes-to-frogtown/