Few horror movies scream summer quite like FROGS (1972). Released in the spring of 1972, the film was poised midway between Alfred Hitchcock’s proto-revenge-of-nature thriller THE BIRDS (1963) and JAWS (1975) but took its direct inspiration from WILLARD (1971), in which rats wrecked havoc at the behest of a societal malcontent. WILLARD beget its own sequel, BEN (1972), and the snakes-on-the-loose flick STANLEY (1972), in which snakes wrecked havoc at the behest of a societal malcontent. That same year, domesticated chimpanzees and gorillas took back the night in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and before long mankind had to watch its back around insurgents of all stripes and spots, from more snakes in SNAKES (1974) to big rabbits in NIGHT OF THE LEPUS (1974) to teeny tiny ants in PHASE IV (1974) to dogs in DOGS (1976) and creepy crawlies in KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977) and hookworms in SQUIRM (1976), the odd oversized GRIZZLY (1976) and assorted PIRANHA (1978) before the bargain package of DAY OF THE ANIMALS (1978) left us deeply unsure of whom to trust… pet-wise. Although the revenge-of-nature film limped on for a few more years, the success of HALLOWEEN (1978) put the slaughter onus back onto the bipedal. With societal malcontents content to do their own slashing through the 1980s, an appreciable something was lost to the horror genre… namely horror!

Horror was in a funny place in 1972. The gains of ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) notwithstanding, the genre had not yet achieved the crossover status it would be granted after the success of THE EXORCIST (1973) the following year. Sure, the major studios still cranked out the odd fright flick — HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS (1970) from MGM, THE MEPHISTO WALTZ (1971) from Fox, LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971) and THE POSSESSION OF JOEL DELANEY (1972) from Paramount — but these were rarely, if ever, considered prestige pictures. Scaremongering was left to the minors, to the independents and Hammer Studios over in the UK, who were still cranking out Dracula and Frankenstein films well into the decade. Among the independents, perhaps the most vital was American International Pictures, who had enjoyed a solid run of profitable science fiction and horror movies with and without the participation of Roger Corman through the mid-50s and the whole of the 60s before Corman’s formation of his own company, New World Pictures. Absent Corman, AIP soldiered on with a wide variety of genre product, including COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE (1970), THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971), BLACULA (1972), THE THING WITH TWO HEADS (1972) and, of course, FROGS.

As was (and so often continues to be) the custom with low budget horror movies, FROGS centered around the performance of a ringer — Hollywood veteran Ray Milland, thirty years out from his Oscar win for THE LOST WEEKEND (1945). Given the Boris Karloff treatment and plunked into a wheelchair for the duration, Milland brought his trademark irascibility to the role of wealthy American industrialist Jason Crockett, who has assembled his extended family around him for his annual 4th of July birthday celebration. The onion in the ointment is the encroachment onto Crockett’s island estate an army of big-ass frogs, whose nocturnal croaking is driving everyone batty. When ecological photographer Pickett Smith (an often shirtless but clean-shaven Sam Elliott) trespasses onto “Crockettland” to gauge the effect of pollution on the local ecosystem, Old Man Crockett waives his rights to due process and presses the hunky stranger into sticking around to suss out the source of the natural imbalance. Meanwhile, frictions within the Crockett clan divert attention away from the disappearance of several members of the family and household staff.

Of course, it’s no mystery — it’s the frogs! And the snakes, and the lizards, and the alligators, and the spiders, and the birds and butterflies and snapping turtles and even leaches. Yes– leaches: man’s best friend! So many creatures great and small conspire and collaborate to ankle humanity here that FROGS plays out like the amphibian equivalent of Dunkirk. Unlike THE BIRDS or JAWS, FROGS is very much a body count movie, a weird hybrid of Agatha Christie and Tennessee Williams (seriously — Ray Milland is Big Daddy, Sam Elliott is Chance Wayne and just about everyone else is Sebastian Venable) that’s cut to the syncopated rhythm of somebody kicking it every five minutes. It’s in this structure that FROGS deviates from the Hitchcock playbook to inch closer to John Carpenter/Sean S. Cunningham territory. As would the nascent slasher subgenre that supplanted animal revenge pictures, FROGS distinguishes itself by virtue of the creative kill, offering a three-ring-bread-and-circus aesthetic in which we are encouraged to speculate which critter will spell doom for a particular character.

In the film’s most protracted setpiece, potty old Iris Martindale (Holly Irving) tramps into the kudzu on the trail of a rare butterfly, which she hopes to add to her collection. Quickly confused (well, more so) by the barely navigable brush, she becomes at first disoriented and then terrified as the entirety of the animal kingdom turns on her in an instant, hissing and hanging and snapping and seemingly pointing her through a humid gauntlet of potential death traps. Remarkably, Iris survives a number of ostensibly lethal encounters, including stumbling into a brackish tarn, only to meet her maker at the fangs of a rattlesnake. Bitten on the hand, she dies instantly (yeah, I know) and not only does Mario (TERROR IN THE JUNGLE – see it!) Tosi’s camera linger on Iris’ corpse but then we jump cut to the body at a slightly later juncture, at which point it has become cyanotic (yeah, I know). Why FROGS reserved its most agonizing demise for its most pitifully well-meaning character is just one of the gloriously head-scratching decisions that makes the movie such a summer sleeper. It’s nasty — just like nature!

Turning 18 in 1979, I was the right age for the rise of the slashers but I found the films unilaterally lacking. Their “Boo– you’re dead!” aesthetic was too dependent on the jump scare; characters rarely knew something evil was afoot before they had a machete thudded into their faces or got their heads twisted front-to-back. The characters in FROGS have time to anticipate their karmic comeuppance, and their death scenes are, as I have discussed, drawn out. While few of us are likely to develop a genuine fear of frogs, I think we can all agree that their ingress en mass into our home would hardly be welcome. Beyond the immediate fear of death, FROGS posits a fresh Hell in the idea of being overrun by nature, of being subsumed — perhaps best illustrated in a scene in which fey Michael Martindale (David Gilliam), who has fled the front lawn following a humiliating set-to with his sporty cousin Clint (Adam Roarke) to shoot birds, accidentally blows off his kneecap with a shotgun and drops to the forest floor. Lying supine, he finds himself sandbagged by Spanish moss while tarantulas spin a coverlet of silk (yeah, I know) around him, entombing him. He screams but is out of human earshot and his last lucid thought is surely one of abject desperation and the horror of being re-wombed by Mother Nature. Now that’s something Jason Voorhees can’t beat with a stick.

I don’t want to oversell FROGS as some kind of lost gem. Directed perfunctorily by Canadian journeyman George McCowan (who had in the years leading up to this helmed a number of memorable American TV movies, including THE LOVE WAR, LOVE HATE LOVE, IF TOMORROW COMES and RUN, SIMON, RUN with Burt Reynolds), the film shoehorns in too much animal footage (some of it, I think, reused) and minor characters like Judy Pace’s black fashion model (who is introduced using a Ouija board for no discernible reason) are given very little to do; Sam Elliott is sold as some kind of professional photographer yet he seems never to have heard of a telephoto lens and later he hitches a ride with a young mom and her son who both seem unfazed by this stranger’s pump action shotgun. On the plus side, the characters, while sketchy, are not broadly drawn and Milland’s miserable old fuck is at least not etched as a racist — he’s just intractably conservative, much like his character in PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO (1962), and it’s interesting to note how this trait devolved from a strength to a limitation in the space of a single decade. Add to the mix a subtly unnerving score by Les Baxter (Tropicando this ain’t) and some of the best costume design you’re likely to find in an animal revenge picture and you’ve got yourself a pleasantly unpleasant diversion, the perfect fit for a lazy, hazy summer afternoon.