There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you can have something than ends with both a bang and a whimper…
Trog (1970)
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
Directed by: Freddie Francis
Many years ago, inspiring, majestic creatures of legend roamed the land. Their every move, even their very existence, inspired awe when we try to imagine them many years later.
But when the studio system fell apart, the screen idols of that time had to adapt or perish. Some were successful, finding new audiences in television. A few even found work in politics, even if they only starred in B-films with animal costars and ridiculous-
No, must. Resist. Obvious. Comment…
But some, unfortunately, could not adapt to a changing world. For many, their habitats could not sustain them as their agents stopped returning their phone calls, and they would quietly fade from view.
Though in this case, “quietly” would be a poor choice of words…
The credits roll over three young men as they hike through the contemporary English countryside. As we get closer in, we get a clearer look at Malcolm, and Cliff, and Bill (David Griffin, John Hamil, and Geofree Case, respectively), seeing them wearing hard helmets and carrying ice axes.
We discover as the credits end why they’re carrying this gear: They’re spelunkers, cave explorers looking for interesting holes in the ground to climb around in. And boy, do they find a real beut when they go down into the latest hole they find.
It’s pristine, with an underwater stream that flows through a hole in the floor into another chamber. Their zest for exploration drives Cliff and Bill to strip to their skivvies and swim through to the other side.
Yes, it sounds like a stupid thing to do, which they both realize when Bill’s savagely beaten to death and Cliff goes into shock, bringing him to Brockton Research Center. Admittedly, you hear horror stories about the NHS, but not taking your friend to a proper hospital as Malcom does here, that’s not readily explainable…
Maybe Cliff ends up there because of the head of the facility, Dr. Brockton herself (Joan Crawford). At one point she’s referred to as an anthropologist, but otherwise in the film goes under the title of “scientist.” This means either she is a brilliant multi-discipline savant (which is why Cliff is under her medical care), or the screenwriters brought only a first draft to the set and no one ever challenged them to do a re-write…
Soon enough, Brockton goes to the caves with Malcolm to find out what the guys saw, and with incredible luck manages to get photographic evidence of what’s down there. Her one single picture she shot blind captures the face of the creature, a troglodyte or “trog,” as it was lifting a rock above its head. At first Inspector Greenham (Bernard Kay) looks at the evidence and declares it a bad make-up job done for a prank, but tied as he is to being in the film, he can’t state the obvious and must go through the motions.
(Greenham was more right than he imagined; the make-up was essentially the remnants of one of the prehistoric men costumes from 2001, slapped on the actor’s head, not trying too hard to pass itself off as anything other than that…)
Faster than you can say “Piltdown Man Hoax,” the police are set up at the edge of the cave, along with a television crew from one of the less-successful ITV outlets, where they try and send someone down there to find this trog. Opposed to the effort is Sam Murdock (Michael Gough), a businessman who worries in equal parts about the bad publicity for the town this creature threatens, and whether a woman should be in charge of a scientific establishment.
Whether the trog is a hoax is dispelled when the creature (Joe Cornelius) emerges on his own and starts to do to the TV people what he did to Bill. The only thing standing between the village and a subterranean smack-down is Dr. Brockton, who needs to shoot it with three tranquilizing darts to put it to sleep.
From there, the science begins in earnest. With the help of Malcolm and Dr. Brockton’s daughter, Anne (Kim Braden), Dr. Brockton gets to work to try and understand the creature, although from the get-go she seems to know way more about how to handle primitives that she should:
And why, you might ask, is she making this effort? Brockton is convinced almost from the start that Trog (yes, she calls him that) is the “missing link” that would be the evolutionary bridge between Homo and Simia. Probably never agreeing with removing the classification Carl Linnaeus made in his work for Homo sapiens troglodytes, she tries hard to link the two genera this time, hence the studies. To that end, she brings in a team of colleagues from around the world, who progress quickly from casual observation to using surgery to give Trog the power of speech (!?!).
By this point, Trog has more to fear from the scientists than the village from Trog, but Murdock changes the whole equation. Having to this point have the run of the country, with his outbursts and boorish behavior not meeting any resistance, he comes up with a plan: Agitate the crap out of Trog to make him rampage, at which point hilarity carnage ensues, thus proving to everyone that Murdock was right all along.
Which goes pretty well as Murdock planned, save for the part where Trog kills him first before the terror starts…
How anybody thought any of this would work according to plan is hard to fathom. In addition to assuming that anyone who you can call a ‘scientist’ can just do any old science-like stuff, the script just bypassed any effort at making any kind of narrative sense. The only suggestion as to why comes from within the credits, where Aben Kandel gets credit for the screenplay, based off an original story by Peter Bryan and John Gilling. Perhaps Kandel had either one bad collaboration or two disparate stories from the other two, and had to scour them for just the good parts from both; there’s no way otherwise we’d have gotten a script like this.
With so little on the page to work with, it was amazing that anything came of it. Francis’ experience in TV probably served him well in being able to work with so little and get it in on time and within budget. He looks to have run a tight ship, keeping things moving despite all the chaos around him.
Including that around his star as she went nova in her last feature…
Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, for which she won her Academy Award for Best Female Lead
Joan Crawford’s career could itself have been an epic tale, even if you ignore Mommie Dearest. She was a rising star during the silent era who made a successful jump to talkies, a major presence with both MGM and Warner Brothers, and saw a revival with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? But by this time, Crawford was no longer headlining the big studio films she’d been, having to take work in smaller films and, at a time when the people didn’t go easily between the two realms, television (gasp).
You can tell as you watch Crawford that in the back of her mind, she’s unhappy to be doing a film like this. The wild explosion of energy in her delivery at spots when she’s decided that she’s tired of staying in character gets unsettling after a while, the more so when you realize that this would be her final theatrical film. Much like the dinosaurs that lumber through a dream Trog has (don’t ask), she prods ahead, realizing that the era is over, one of the last of her kind about to disappear from this world.
Just a year earlier, she was in the pilot for Night Gallery, directed by an up-and-comer named Steven Spielberg. By the standards of the time, this was considered a step down; had she seen this as a new evolutionary step, perhaps she could have either done the film differently, or even turned it down altogether.
Sadly, we have instead a fossil that makes it hard to appreciate the majestic creature trapped in it…
