Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell



AKA: Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake

After Kelly takes his girlfriend home to the island where he grew up, she asks him to finally explain to her why they’re both there, since he’s been evasive about it up until now. Kelly then, by ambiotic firelight, recounts to her the strange story from his childhood involving scientists, poachers, a crazy old coot, murder, and the strange local legend of a Frog Man living in the lake. And it all started when he found a strange fossil out by the lake shore…



Behold, after much consideration I’ve come up with my new theme for the month: Frogs! Why frogs? WHY NOT FROGS?!….Ahem. Actually, it’s just because more than one frog film inexplicably found its way onto my watch-list, that’s why. So that’s why we’re going with the glory of frogs this month! Oh and, uh, one leprechaun movie because I don’t actually have enough frog films for the whole month. But I expect there to be a lot of green involved in that film regardless, so I’m sure I’ll still be slightly on-theme. But mostly, there will be frogs (ribbit ribbit).


See! A frog!

First up is Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell, an American monster movie from 1980. The film was directed by Bill Rebane, the crappy/campy movie maestro better known for such dreck as The Giant Spider Invasion, and the nigh-incomprehensable Monster A-Go-Go, the later of which you should only watch if you’re curious to see just how horrendously cheap a film can get while still inexplicably managing to get released (they were so poor they couldn’t even hook up an actual phone, so when one rings the sound effect is some unseen dude just off screen going “brrrrrrring!” It’s sad.)

And on top of THAT, the film was also released by the equally notoriously cheesy production company, Troma! Making Croaked one of their earliest distributed titles. Meaning this is a film with both a notoriously cheesy/cheap director, AND a notoriously cheesy/cheap production company attached to it. Do you know what that means, boys and girls? That means that with this film we have achieved PEAK Z-Grade schlock.

I shall now give you a brief moment to appreciate the alignment of the stars that was needed to bring this serendipity about.



Truth be told though, this may actually be one of Rebane’s more successful movies. If only because Croaked actually has some semblance of an actual plot. You know, one where I can actually follow the story and such (curse you, Monster A-Go-Go.) Granted, it’s not a very good plot, and it’s filled with a lot of useless nonsense whose only purpose, as far as I can tell, is to add padding to an otherwise very short film and potentially bore the audience. The whole opening and ending with an adult Kelly narrating much of the story? Completely unnecessary to the rest of the story, AND it feels clumsily tacked on (knowing Rebane it quite possibly was). The scientists? Surprisingly, they don’t do much science-ing beyond some info dumping. Which would be fine, except quite a bit of it is FALSE info dumping, making one seriously wonder about the validity of their professional credentials (frogs are amphibians, not reptiles.)


It feels like such a basic thing like that could have been easily fact-checked for the script.

So the movie is kinda boring. Bummer. The plus side, though? Things are actually happening during it! Other than people simply sitting around having boring conversations, I mean (again, curse you A-Go-Go). Instead, people are actually doing things. Like, uh, boating, and fishing, and running, and even shooting at one another. Oh! And you get to watch a goat clumsily fall and catch itself after it tried, and failed, to jump on a bed. That was amusing. So going by all the movement, unlike some of his other films I think Rebane might actually have had some sort of a budget for this thing. Granted, it often doesn’t look like that budget would have covered giving each of the cast and crew a bottle of cheap beer from the gas station to celebrate finishing filming. But they did set fire to and blow something up at the end, so I know he must have had something to work with. Sadly though, most of it isn’t nearly as exciting as it sounds, and the movie still ends up being spectacularly boring. Except for maybe the goat. Again, the goat is cool. But that’s not really much to build a movie going experience around.


At least it was a cute goat.

Perhaps the acting and dialogue are a little better, you ask?.…Ha ha… ha…. Uh, no. I think I read somewhere that the film was shot in a matter of days. Not months or weeks, DAYS. And judging from just the plot I suspect that the script was written in just about the same amount of time. Or even possibly while they were making it. Because just like there are tons of holes in the story, there are also equal holes in the dialogue. And I don’t just mean the scientific kind, though those did bother me more than most. There’s other things, too. Like the one point towards the end where Kelly says something about how the poachers stole all their guns and then his dad simply reaches into the gun cabinet and… pulls out a gun? I mean…. Come on. Why is that there? That should have been an easy fix.


Maybe “he took your guns” means something different in swamp country?

And of course since the film seems to be at least partially based on the 1950 monster movies of old, most of the characters are boring and one dimensional enough on their own. But even so, the dialogue sounds so bland and formulaic (and sometimes downright wrong!) that it really exacerbates the other problems. Because very little that’s spoken ends up sounding natural or fluid. Like, none of this sounds like the way most normal people talk, ya know? I mean, how many times do you really need to say that everyone is about to be in “a heap of trouble” in the span of a minute? If you’re curious, the answer the movie came up with was: three. THREE TIMES Cal says that in less than 60 seconds. It makes it sound like they were trying to give the old coot a sitcom catchphrase and were trying to do it as quickly as humanly possible.


Dang-nabbit…nah… Cornswallow…no, that’s no good…. Fiddlesticks…. Damn, I’m bad at this.

Not that I want to be too critical of Bruno Alexander who plays Old Coot Cal, since he’s one of the few actors putting in any amount of real effort. Now, it was way too much effort, to the point where he’s just a cheesy caricature of some ole’ time prospector crossed with one of those old guys who sit on their porch with a gun yelling at kids to “get off my lawn!”. But at least with him you can tell he was trying. The rest of the cast seems to be going with the general vibe of the rest of the movie and doing their best to be as bland as possible, often delivering their lines with blank faces or stilted dictation. Well, except for the kid played by Brad Ellingson. He at least, sounded like a normal kid. Probably because he didn’t know any better and was just excited to be in his first movie. Still, it’s kinda sad when the inexperienced kid is doing a better job of acting normal than half the cast. Really my only complaint about him was that his character couldn’t shoot for shit, but I’ll get to that in a bit.


Emote, damn you! EMOTE!

I’d like to say that you at least have something to look forward to with regards to the monster. But…boy, that’s a whole different category of disappointment right there. The movie starts off like your typical monster movie by only showing hints of the creature, via things like bubbles in the water, or shadows, or even quick shots from the creature’s point of view. And then later you get to see this green hand as it grabs at people or punches through windows. You know, standard monster stuff.

But then you FINALLY get to see this thing at the end of the movie and…I’m sorry, that is not a frog. The poster shows me a frog. Rana even means FROG in Spanish. So, silly me, here I am expecting some large thing at least resembling a frog. Maybe a lot of jumping, and big eyes, and a giant prehensile tongue it can maybe use to grab victims or even whip them in their stupid looking face or something. THAT would have been cool. THAT’S a concept that had potential. But of course that’s not what we get. What we get is a guy in a rubber scuba suit that they painted green, something that looks like a very cheap Creature from the Black Lagoon or Sleestak costume. But it does NOT in any way resemble a frog. Meaning the movie poster has lied to me, and I am now filled with woe. But not as much woe as Rana, because not only is it not a frog, but it is apparently also inexplicably stuffed with dynamite, as evidenced by its EXPLOSION when someone finally shoots it.


Ugh! Lame!


Was it filled with carbon or some kind of alkali metal? WT actual F?

Which of course brings me to all the weirdness going on in this film. Because it’s only natural that cheap schlock such as this have weirdness. Now, for the most part the movie isn’t too bad. And by that I mean that, beyond the science people not being very bright or the monster being made of nitro glycerin, I can at least follow along with most of what’s going on and some of the character’s reasoning.

For instance, the poachers are there looking for gold, and Cal knows what they’re up to. So that’s why he’s taking pot shots at them with his rifle, because he also knows about Rana, and thus knows (or at least suspects) what will happen to everyone if the poachers tick off the lake monster. But we never learn how the poachers found out about the gold, since the area is so remote and the only other person who knows is the crazy old swamp man. More importantly though, is that Kelly’s dad, a RANGER, is fully aware that Cal is shooting at people, and does absolutely bug-all about it. He just treats his reckless endangerment like it’s one of the old guy’s quirks. Like, “ha ha, he’s at it again, that old rascal.” Bizarre.


Gods, the things they’d let you get away with in the 70s.

Speaking of shooting (told you I’d get back to it), let’s talk about how just about everyone in this movie sucks at it. Or perhaps more accurately, just how no one knows how to use guns during a crisis. Cal never hits anything. Though one could argue that he was never trying to. At the end of the movie Kelly, who has managed to get his hands on both a rifle and a handgun, shoots at the monster after it breaks into the house. Well, actually he shoots the rifle BEFORE Rana gets into the house, blindly blowing a hole through a boarded up window before he can even see anything. Why was the window boarded up? Because his dumb-ass dad did the same thing 20 minutes earlier. Apparently stupidity runs in the family.


The hell are you doing, my guy? Did they not teach gun safety in Ranger School? Do you have something against windows?

Anyway, after boldly declaring how he’s going to kill this thing and shooting a new convenient entrance for the monster to break through, Kelly does the same thing again to the door. Because it’s just good manners to give your monsters options in their terror attacks, I suppose. But of course despite Kelly blowing two new holes into the house, the monster breaks in anyway (Who could have foreseen this?!) and our tiny hero hides under a table while the Not-Frog-Man hoists Megan, your standard monster movie female teenage victim, over its shoulder and leaves. Only then, after the monster turns its back on him, does Kelly become brave again, unloading the pistol into the darkness. But just like before he’s doing this while he can’t see anything (hell, we can barely see anything), and he manages to shoot just about everything but the monster. He also, miraculously, manages to NOT hit Megan, which I was fully expecting him to do.


Chick should have honestly been RIDDLED with holes by this point.

Then, only after Kelly has chased the monster down to the lake and the creature has set his hostage down (why did he take her in the first place?) does Kelly finally manage to hit him, and the thing goes up like a roman candle. The only person who took longer than Kelly to kill his enemy was his father, who got beat up twice, before finally shooting one of the poachers. But at least that scene gave us the payoff of watching a spectacularly stupid death, where the poacher gets shot, flips his rifle, and then jumps backwards into the water, in slow motion. It was one of the most ridiculously dramatic deaths I’ve ever seen.


Good grief, talk about milking it.

The one thing the movie has in its favor, is that there is actually some gore in it. Not a lot – cause again, cheap – but enough for you to know that between it and the explosion they probably spent a good chunk of change on it. The monster smashes someone’s head into a tree, you see a torso ripped in half, and some fingers end up severed with an ax. So there is some blood in this, it’s just not all that impressive. And in some cases, it’s actually a bit confusing. How is there a skull with a fully intact eyeball still in the swamp? And what was up with the Frog Dude’s acid goo? Sometimes it seemed to be poisonous, sometimes it burned, sometimes it didn’t do anything. Just some odd inconsistencies all around.







There’s more to Croaked, of course. Like a Frog Baby corpse whose purpose I still can’t decipher. Or multiple ill-timed tension stings. Or a score that often sounds like it belongs more in some sort of Saturday Morning Cartoon than it does in something that’s supposed to be a horror movie. Cause I don’t know about you, but when I think “horror soundtrack”, I think wacky xylophone stings. Oh yeah. That’s the stuff. At least it is if you enjoy watching exceptionally cheesy horror movies. Which, in my humble opinion, I believe this qualifies for. Because between the bad acting, the inaccuracies, and just the general weirdness going on, fans of such strangeness will probably find some way to get a kick out of this movie, because this sucker is firing on all cylinders. But if you’re looking for, you know, a decent monster movie that’s actually scary and junk, then you’re going to want to avoid this film. Not only will it bore you, but it’ll likely make you angry in several instances.

Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell is available on a variety of streaming services.

Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell is also available on DVD Troma, but is currently out of print.

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