Not Quite There: Hell Comes to Frogtown

Going For It:

• Wrestling legend "Rowdy" Roddy Piper
• Frog people with decent make-up/costumes
• That's about it...

The Case Against:

• Severely uneven tone for the protagonist in the writing
• Severely dull
• Severely disappointing

MMG Says:

While we are a proud people here at the Man Movie Guide, we are not afraid or ashamed to admit when we were wrong.  This is one of those instances.  You will have noticed that some time back we posted, on its lonesome, the trailer for 'Hell Comes to Frogtown'.  In MMG-ese, that is our way of saying that we approve of that movie and that it qualifies as a true Man Movie up for review on down the road.

Let us set the stage for you:  Post apocalyptic.  Starring Roddy Piper, wrestling legend and pitch perfect star of MMG favorite 'They Live'.  The protagonist is named Sam Hell, one of the few times we endorse a cute/clever character name.  Sam is an exceedingly rare fertile man in a world that consists only of the following: fertile women, desert wasteland, fertile women, mutant frog people, and fertile women.  Sam is contracted by the government to begin repopulating civilization.  This, dear reader, is a can't-fucking-lose proposition... right?  Not so.  Not so.

The movie starts off nicely enough.  Piper is detained for a crime before the movie begins.  In the initial few scenes he is a wisecracking jokester; and while not every line hits its mark, it is a very good indication that we are getting our hands on the one-liner wisenheimer brand of action hero in this movie.  Only this never really happens.  The viewer must slog through an entire movie as bare and bereft of life as its arid backdrop. The action is few and far between, fairly somnambulent, and Piper doesn't do quite the ass-kicking job that we'd come to expect from either the ring or 'They Live'.  Piper's character even loses his charm pretty quickly; as his 'sit-on-it-and-spin' attitude largely falls prey to a messianic mope routine with occasional bouts of slapstick (centering around his genitals in an electric chastity belt and his ability to cross his eyes... which is oddly not related to his balls' predicament).

As for the supporting cast, it's a mixed bag.  We get a super butch/fairly attractive commando who shows off her tits while escorting Piper.  And if you have a thing for Katey Sagal, then perhaps you can make a case for watching the movie, since there are extended scenes of her bordering-on-malnourished doppelganger prancing around in assorted lingerie.  Then we have poor Rory Calhoun, who genuinely looked and sounded like his handlers had to unhook his oxygen tank between takes (he seemed so close to death that we actually had to check on the proximity of this movie to his actual demise... and astonishingly he held on for another 11 years, and worked another 5).  Lastly, there are the frogs.  There isn't a whole lot to say about them, except that looking at them was one of the scant pleasures this reviewer got from the movie.

This movie, like so many others that fall short, failed to achieve true Man Movie status because it tried to walk in both the light and the dark.  If it resorted to Lloyd Kaufman (Troma) antics?  We have ourselves a winner.  If it went the route of all the killer action movies of the 80s, the Golden Age of the one-liner action film, and focused more on making Piper an ass-kicker who always says something droll after offing a frog? We'd worship it as a direct-to-video masterpiece.  Instead we're left with a movie that gets a passing grade only because we're proud they tried.

Not Quite There: Drive Angry

Going For It:

• A movie about someone who escapes from hell in a muscle car to shoot the shit out of people
• Female lead, Amber Heard, is literally just a walking Maxim spread, replete with witty banter and cut-off jean shorts
• Features the music of T-Rex, Unkle, and Peaches
• Muscle cars
• Car chases
• Violent bloody deaths
• Satanists
• One-liners
• Shot for 3D for maximum in-your-face Xtreme-ness©
• Tits

The Case Against:

• We at MMG are Nicolas Cage apologists, but even that has its limits...
• No movie hero, especially an anti-hero, should be called Milton through the whole movie (we don't care if it is a last name!)
• Did we mention that the movie hero, who escapes hell, is named John Milton?!  Yeah, real subtle...
• The music is jarring and distracting, often with little-to-no place in the scene it's played
• 3D Xtreme-ness© isn't pulled off very well
• Terribly written
• The tits belong to a busted ex-stripper type

MMG Says...

So many people are quick to rip on Nic Cage.  We here at MMG will eventually convince you otherwise; he was brilliant in Adaptation, and far more than capable in MMG-favorites The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off. This movie, however, will not convert you to the Church of Cage (which, coincidentally, is on one of his private islands).  He is dreadful in this movie: mostly he drawls sleepily through his lines as if he were just shoved onto the set from his trailer while still in the middle of a Quaalude haze.  His delivery lives on another planet from the other actors, the script itself, and even the scenarios he is put in.  Other times his actions are stilted, jerky, and sudden with no pacing whatsoever, such as when he creepily mouth-rapes a once-raring-to-go diner waitress.  It's difficult to tell if he picked this role and this movie and this acting style for any reason other than to further his own legend as an eccentric with no real place on film.  Mission accomplished, Mister Cage. Mission accomplished.

The movie itself is written a pair of fellers (one of whom doubles as director) who knew they wanted to make a Man Movie.  Unfortunately for us, the viewers, their resume features a lot of dreck with the same failings.  Their heart seems to be consistently in the right place, and we as lovers of all things Man Movie laud  any return to grindhouse, exploitation, and cheeseball horror... the problem is that they are just not very talented.

And so we find ourselves with a movie full of ripe premises and promising situations, that falls completely flat.  This could have been the movie that every father would show to their sons on their 13th birthday.  Instead, this is just another 90+ minutes relegated for an eternity of dollar bins at Wal-Mart and liquidations at video stores everywhere.

One last plea to the writers, Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier.  Guys, we get it.  You like Stephen King and Sam Raimi.  You think you're clever for being able to work in a wink and nod to an epic poem about the devil and the fall of man.  But do us a fucking favor and don't name your characters King, Raimi, and Milton.  It's pretty sophomoric, and that's saying something... considering what your movie is about.

Not Quite There: A Primer

Later this week we are launching a new feature on the site called "Not Quite There" ...

The Man Movie Guide team watches a ton of movies in order to cull the best ones for review on the site.  It takes a lot to be a real Man Movie... as our "So what IS a Man Movie?" can attest to.  So that means that a vast percentage of the movies we watch for the express purpose of review on the site are abandoned because they're not up to snuff.

Our guide is a heavily curated one, and a lot of man hours (pun intended) are put into finding just the right movies for a full-on review.  Well we can now think of a few big problems with the way things have worked up until now:

1) You might be curious about a movie and just assume we haven't seen it.  Well guess what? WE HAVE!  Now we can tell you where things go right and things go wrong with the whole thing.

Going right....

2) In the conceivable near future we will be asked to review movies by filmmakers and/or studios.  What if the movie's not good enough?  We're not gonna just be nice and call it a Man Movie because we watched it for the site.  We don't care about anybody's feelings, but we do like free movies and/or money.  So now we have a way of espousing a movie without fully endorsing it.

3) One of the worst things about some of these bad or almost-bad movies is the time taken from the running counter of life that we will never get added back.  So bad enough 'Movie X' isn't worthy of a true Man Movie review, but now we don't even get a posting out of it?  Frankly, we think that's bullshit.  We are lazy people.  Why should we have to sit through 12 hours of film in order to get one review when we can sit through just an hour and a half?!

'Movie X'

And there you have it, our idea for "Not Quite There".  The way it will be laid out is as follows:

- Movie Title (that's the name of the movie)

- Trailer (so you can see said movie in action-ish)

- "Going For It" (a list of the pros for this movie as a Man Movie and anything else notably good in it)

- "The Case Against" (a list of what is holding it back from being a true Man Movie)

- "MMG Says..." (a recap of the movie and any relevant information)

As always, we are mad scientists with the site and even our own posts.  If you have any feedback, we would love to hear it.

Vaya con dios!