Film Appreciation - 4th of July with Pickett and Crockett

Cody Hamman celebrates the Fourth of July with 1972's Frogs for Film Appreciation.

Sam Elliott is one of our great character actors, and he’s best known for three things: his awesome voice, his iconic mustache, and his decades-long relationship with Katharine Ross. But his career stretches back long before he started seeing Ross and before he grew that mustache (he always had that voice, though), and one of the movies he worked in that mustache-free era was the 1972 “nature run amok” horror film Frogs, which has recently become a favorite of mine.

Directed by George McCowan from a script by Robert Hutchison and Robert Bless, this American International Pictures classic sees Elliott taking on the role of Pickett Smith, a wildlife photographer who gets stuck on the private island owned by the wealthy Crockett family after the drunken Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke) gets too close to his canoe with his speedboat and tips the poor guy over. Clint and his sister Karen (Joan Van Ark) take Pickett to the family mansion so he can dry up and make a phone call – but he can’t make that call because the phone is dead.

Pickett has entered the lives of the Crocketts just in time for their Fourth of July celebration, which is a major deal for this family because multiple members also have birthdays in July, including the highly opinionated, disabled patriarch Jason (the legendary Ray Milland). The July get-together is so important to Jason that insists on sticking to the plans even when things start going terribly wrong around the island. One of his adult grandchildren has been found dead? Well, that’s unfortunate, but we still need to eat some cake!

Before Pickett can get away from this island, it becomes increasingly clear to him and the others – including Lynn Borden as Clint’s wife Jenny, David Gilliam and Nicholas Cortland as Jason’s grandsons Michael and Kenneth, Judy Pace as Kenneth’s girlfriend Bella, Hollis Irving as Jason’s daughter Iris, George Skaff as her husband Stuart, youngest grandchildren Tina and Jay (Dale Willingham and Hal Hodges), butler Charles (Lance Taylor Sr.), maid Maybelle (Mae Mercer), and handyman Grover (played by some gutsy stuntman) – that the local wildlife has gone homicidal. It seems that pollution and an excessive use of insecticide have drive the animals on the island and in the surrounding area over the edge, and they’re out to make humans pay with their lives.

Frogs was filmed in Walton County, Florida, with the Wesley House, an old Southern mansion located in Eden Gardens State Park, standing in for the Crockett mansion. This is a set that I would not want to have been anywhere near, because it was populated with 500 Florida frogs, 100 cane toads, and a number of scorpions, tarantulas, Argentine black and white tegus, geckos, iguanas, rattlesnakes, alligators, cottonmouths, crabs, and alligator snapping turtles. Over the course of the film, we see how the deaths of multiple characters are caused by the likes of snakes, lizards, alligators, leeches, a turtle, tarantulas, and even some unexpectedly lively moss. Despite the title, frogs are not the primary threat in this movie, even if they happen to be all over the place.

I am creeped out by most of the creatures on that list and find Frogs disgusting to even look at during various moments, but that doesn’t keep me from enjoying the movie. It has a cool, old-fashioned tone and style to it, and you can imagine a lot of people having fun watching this play out on drive-in screens across the United States back in 1972.

A surprisingly strong cast was assembled for this one, and it’s awesome to see Sam Elliott as the hero in something like this. One of the most entertaining aspects of the film is the performance Ray Milland delivers as Jason, or Grandpa Crockett. Grandpa is a hard-headed, grumpy bastard, the fact that Milland wasn’t happy to be on the set probably enhanced the performance. Milland was low on cash at this point in his life, he wore a toupee during production that kept falling off his head due to sweat in the Florida heat and humidity, and he was so displeased with the whole set-up that he left three days before filming wrapped. His discomfort paid off, because he’s awesome in this movie.

Given the Fourth of July setting, my girlfriend and I have taken to celebrating the holiday every year by watching Frogs, along with other movies that happen on or around the holiday, like Jaws, The Return of the Living Dead, I Know What You Did Last Summer, etc. I look forward to our Frogs viewing every year, and we always have a good time watching it.