Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

connorbbalboa Whenever I watch a big star on his or her last legs, degrading oneself to such a dreadful film, I always feel a bit dead inside. Roger Moore finally exhausted himself as James Bond in A View To a Kill, for one thing. Here, Joan Crawford, one of the most renowned actress of Classic Hollywood, finds herself being degraded to playing an anthropologist playing "Mommy" to a caveman in a cheap-looking ape costume.The film begins with three freelance geology students exploring a new cave in the English countryside. One of them is killed by an unknown creature and another is in shock and heavily wounded. Joan Crawford's Dr. Brockton and the third student go down to the cave and find the troglodyte that is hiding there. They eventually lure him out with the press watching, and Brockton captures him with the hope to civilize him like a normal human being.Let me start off by saying that Crawford is quite bad here. Most of the time she's on screen, she almost looks like she is going to explode in a fit of hilarious anger, even when she has a pleasant expression on her face. One can just tell from looking at her on the screen that as an actress, she's washed up at this point. Even though she would make another appearance as a TV actress later, this was her last movie. What a depressing way to go out. Michael Gough also costars as a vague businessman who hates Trog for no other reason than he thinks that his presence would interfere with his business dealings, whatever they are. To set off the film's final rampage, he angers Trog and sets him free, stupidly not expecting Trog to go after him once he's set free. Gough is just half-hearted here, struggling especially to make his disgusted speech towards Trog believable.Aside from the hilariously bad performances, the film is really boring. Most of it is devoted to Crawford playing with Trog like a pet and treating him like a kid with disabilities, which is sort of what she compares him to. The film wants me to care about all of this, but I don't, mainly because her plans should have already been rendered moot with the fact that he has killed four people by the time he ends up in her lab. Does she not care about human life, despite her position? The Trog costume is so poor, that only actor Joe Cornelius's eyes allow for any kind of expression from the creature. This is especially unacceptable considering that John Chambers' Academy Award-winning make up for Planet of the Apes (1968) allowed more expression from the actors and were quite revolutionary.There are even little inaccuracies related to science and religion. When Brockton defends not killing Trog, she refers to what she thinks is the Second Amendment, "Thou shalt not kill." First off, it's a Commandment, and second, it's the sixth one. Also, when she talks about her profession, she lists gorillas and apes as related to humans. Doctor, gorillas are apes too. There is a big operation that involves putting a control grid inside of Trog's chest that will allow him to talk for some reason. It's not explained how. Part of the experiment also leads to Trog remembering dinosaur fights, which is actually footage from Irwin Allen's The Animal World (1956), and with the fights done via stop-motion by Ray Harryhausen. Sadly, it's one of his weaker efforts. After the experiment, Trog talks. I don't get it. It's incredibly obvious that the science was outdated even when the film was released. Trog is supposed to be a "missing link" according to Dr. Brockton, but Australopithecines had already been discovered at this point, and they are considered more of a missing link. Also, a troglodyte is defined as nothing more than a person living in a cave. It does not refer to a half-ape, half-human creature.Trog is probably the worst low grade monster movie from the 1970s that I've seen. Yes, even worse than Night of the Lepus, Frogs, The Swarm, or Dracula A.D. 1972. It's an embarrassing film that should never have been made, and, given how the Hollywood atmosphere was changing, can't even qualify as 70s entertainment.

poe426 TROG scared the bejeezus out of me when I was a kid. It featured what had to be one of the most horrifying creatures to ever come creeping hideously across the Big Screen. I'm talking about Joan Crawford, of course. (And, yes, that WAS a joke.) I recently revisited this one for the first time since my childhood and, while a lot of it just doesn't hold up to close scrutiny, it's still a fun movie. (I KNEW it! According to the IMDb, the mask worn by Joe Cornelius as TROG was originally one of the ape-men from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. I would've bet money on that even before reading the IMDb trivia.) The scene that shook me up most as a kid (aside from the creepy cavern scenes early on) was the scene where Trog surprises Michael Gough as he's about to flee the scene of the crime. I also found the scenes where our hero lopes about the countryside at night in search of the entrance to his underground home pretty scary. Sigh. They just don't make 'em like this any more...

utgard14 Trog, for those who don't know, is short for troglodyte. Trog is also a guy wearing a monkey mask who eats rubber lizards and dreams about dinosaur stock footage. Notorious for being Joan Crawford's final film, as well as for being one of the all-time great "so bad it's good" movies. Every scene with Trog will have you in stitches.Joan takes her role seriously, which must have been hard. For all of her character's talk about how Trog is more human than animal, she treats him like a dog ("Good boy, Trog"). Michael Gough plays to the rafters as the guy with a hard-on for killing poor Trog. It's an obsession with him. When we first meet him, he's yelling Trog is a hoax. When Trog's existence is proved, he immediately starts yelling to kill it. I can't remember the last time I saw such a cardboard antagonist as this. He exists solely to be a thorn in the side of Crawford and Trog. Surprisingly, this was directed by Freddie Francis, a director who made a lot of movies for Hammer and Amicus. Most of them pretty good. He also won two Oscars as a cinematographer.It's a bad movie on technical and artistic levels, to be sure. But it is also entertaining, which should be the ultimate goal of any movie of this type. I've seen far, far worse movies than this. If you enjoy cheesy Z-grade flicks you'll get a kick out of Trog.

anthony kaye Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh Dear. Twenty seconds of watching Joan Crawford walking around with a bucket of dead fish was enough. This film(presumably like the fish) is a stinker.She was not the first Big Hollywood Star to enter the actor's graveyard of British film-making. Lon Chaney Jr. tried it in Hammer horror. He was dead within a year. She was lucky to last 5. Hardly a cure for alcoholism is it? Anyway I've said enough. I'm turning it off. God knows why I'm supposed to write a minimum of ten lines about this nonsense, but I'll try anyway. I always thought that brevity was a virtue but not, it seems, on an IMDb comments page. I think I've made it. I'm off to bed.