Trog - An Underground Movie That Should Have Stayed Buried

These days there is tendency to elevate every bad movie to the status of being a 'cult classic', by claiming that it is 'so bad that it is good', or because it is 'camp'. This is particularly true of anything made in the 1960s and 1970s, especially if it features some down-on-their-luck once famous star or director. Well, Trog (filmed in 1969, released in 1970) boasts, incredibly, Joan Crawford in her last film role and, behind the camera, Oscar-winning cinematographer turned director of horror flicks for Hammer and Amicus, Freddie Francis. Sadly though, it's no classic, cult or otherwise. It's just bad. So bad that it stinks. To be fair, most critics and writers in the horror genre have always flagged this one up as a turkey, which inevitably begs the question as to why I subjected myself to viewing Trog this weekend? Well, it's one of those films I remember being in the late-night TV schedules as a kid, but never seeing, and having read about but never seen. Surely it couldn't really be as bad as everyone reckoned, could it? So, when I saw that someone had uploaded the whole film to YouTube, I couldn't resist.

So, what can I say about Trog? Well, for one thing, it is far too slow moving to be considered a cult movie - I felt the will to live leaving me several times during its 91 minute running time, as lengthy dialogue sequence followed lengthy dialogue sequence, with little, or no, action for long periods. To make it worse, the dialogue was atrocious - dull and poorly written, failing completely to move the plot forward in any meaningful way. Ah, the plot! Apparently there's this troglodyte living in a hitherto undiscovered cave system in the Peak District, he's discovered by chance by pot holers, one of whom he kills, with the two survivors finding shelter at at a conveniently nearby scientific institute run by Joan Crawford. Well, you can guess the rest: 'Trog' is flushed out of the caves by the police, captured by Crawford, who tries to study him at her institute, believing him to be the 'missing link', local villagers object, 'Trog' escapes and goes on small-scale village rampage before retreating to caverns and being mown down by the army, (who are terrible shots - they fire hundreds of rounds at him virtually point-blank before finally hitting him).

All pretty standard, except that the script is so poorly constructed that even the most rudimentary logic flies out of the window. Despite the fact that the capture of the apeman is broadcast live on TV, it doesn't seem to excite the interest of the authorities beyond the local police inspector - you'd think that the discovery of a living prehistoric man would have scientists from all over the world descending on the place, but no, Joan Crawford is allowed to keep him locked in the basement. The only time the authorities do seem to take an interest is when the local property developer, (played by professional ham Micheal Gough), complains that his presence is driving down local house prices. At this point the local Magistrates court gets involved to decide the fate of 'Trog'! It is only at this point that Joan Crawford brings in a team of international scientists to assess her captive. At the court hearing everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten that 'Trog' has already killed at least three people, (two cavers and that TV cameraman he brains with a polystyrene rock, not to mention the number of people he must have seriously injured, hurling them around), the last couple live on TV, apparently more concerned at his recent killing of a dog. There are also various plot lines which seem significant, but go nowhere. Like the business of the operation on 'Trog' to give him the power of speech - no sooner is it raised than it is forgotten.

On top of all this, the whole endeavour looks just so, well, shabby. Nothing is remotely convincing, from the polystyrene 'cave' at the beginning to 'Trog' himself, who simply looks like a man in a bad gorilla mask. "Frankly, it looks to me like something out of a student rag week," opines the police inspector. Quite. Not even the locations convince. We know it's meant to be the Peak District because the TV vans have 'Peak TV' written on their sides. However, nobody has a local accent and in one location shot you can see a white horse carved into a distant hill side. You tend not to see those north of Oxford. Most tellingly, there are no peaks in sight, just hills. Bearing in mind that the production was based at Hammer's former studios at Bray, I'm guessing these location scenes were filmed in Berkshire. The feeling of shabbiness is emphasised by the gratuitous inclusion of several minutes of second hand dinosaur footage from 1957's The Animal World, purporting to be the apeman's flashback to his own time. Clearly, none of the actors were convinced - their performances are uniformly poor. Joan Crawford spends the entire film looking into the middle distance, clearly hoping it will all end soon. Even Michael Gough, who could usually be relied upon to give a bizarre performance, can't seem to be bothered.

What finally kills the film is its pretension - despite knowing they were making a low-budget pot-boiler, the makers of this farrago seemed to think that they were saying something profound about the nature of humanity. How else can you explain the tedious and portentous speeches that Crawford keeps making about 'Trog' to anyone who'll listen? In one sequence she plays him classical music, which seems to calm and civilise the beast, but when the record is changed to a rock number, he goes berserk. Are we meant to draw some deeply significant conclusion from this? Who knows, as 'Trog' himself is deeply unsympathetic, left to his own devices he just kills people, and everyone else just seems stupid. Like I said, none of these developments are ever followed up. Still, what should have I expected? The film was produced by Herman Cohen, who had already been responsible for a number of cinematic atrocities on both sides of the Atlantic. That said, at least most of his previous efforts, like 1960s giant man-in-an-ape-suit movie Konga, really were so bad they were good, full of camp and unintentionally hilarious moments. Trog was once released on DVD with the tag line ' Camp Cult Classic'. The problem is that it isn't camp, just sad. Many years after its release, director Freddie Francis commented that Joan Crawford should never have appeared in Trog, saying that 'she should have known better', adding 'so should I'. That about sums it up.

So why have I devoted a post to this sad excuse for a movie? Well, the next time some bad movie apologist tries to convince you that some hoary old 1970s tat is actually a 'classic of pop culture' or some such nonsense, just remember what I've said about Trog. In truth, these things are usually more fun to read about than watch. Look at it this way: I've given up 91 precious minutes of my life watching this rubbish so that you don't have to. I've only linked to the trailer for the usual reasons. If you are determined to watch the whole thing, you'll see the link to the right of the screen if you visit the trailer's YouTube page. If it hasn't been taken down due to copyright infringement, (although I doubt that anyone would want to claim copyright over this turkey). But remember, if you do watch it - I warned you!