For the sake of comparison and argument, let’s take one of the first attack scenes. A young man goes to fetch some orchids from the island’s hothouse, where, unbeknownst to him, his murder is being planned by a group of lizards and other reptiles. As the man gathers his flowers a large iguana-looking thing slowly pulls the door shut with its tale, and the other lizards and snakes slither about between some of the bottles of chemicals, crashing them to the floor and releasing their noxious gases. The man is oblivious to the elaborate scheme and thinks nothing of it until he reaches the jammed up door. More bottles are overturned. The hothouse fills with fumes, and soon the man is overcome and dies a horrible suffocating death.

The scene runs about 2 minutes and was probably shot in less than half a day for the cost of well under $5000.

Flash forward to modern day Hollywood. The movie’s cast is bloated with the hippest young stars who head to an island for an all night rave. Little do they know that the class nerd that they always pick on has developed a genetic code on his new IMac that will turn all the frogs into super-strong beings that will do his bidding. Freddie Prinze Jr. heads to the hothouse to raid the marijuana plants and soon is trapped by the reptiles that leap out and swat at him with their mighty tails.

First they’re going to need a team of animatronics experts to design and build each lizard and frog in the scene so that it can properly knock over the bottles without looking too fake. Then a CGI team will have to match the puppets with a computerized counterpart for the wide full body action scenes. Then another CGI team will have to match the backgrounds to the action so the reptiles will look insanley realistic. Then a foley team will replicate the sound of breaking bottles by utilizing a bag of potato chips, light bulbs, and chopstix. And then yet another CGI team will have to develop, and patent, a computer program that will simulate the rising gaseous fumes. A special FX make-up guru will be called in to design the bubbling face make-up for his team to apply and run with multiple remote controls. And another team of CGI artists will add in the eye popping, blood spurting FX’s.

Number of days to do this 2 minute scene: about one month. The cost will go upwards to about a million bucks. Oh! That would include the part where the animatronic frog turns to the camera and winks and says in Robin Williams voice, “It’s not nice to fool with mother nature”.

I guess that is really frightening, now that I think about it.

Back at the mansion…..

As Elliot and Van Ark try to escape, Milland is steadfast and stubborn, refusing to believe that his island paradise is under attack. “I still believe man is the master of the world,” he argues. He is made to swallow those words as the climax of the film pits him against…..well, you’ll just have to watch it.

I realize that all this plotting sounds pretty basic, and it is. The story is nothing wildly imaginative, or groundbreaking. But the script by Robert Hutchison and Robert Blees weaves together the paranoia and the guilt of the times so well that you can almost imagine that all this nature revenge stuff could really happen. It creeped me out the very first time I saw it as a double bill with Willard, and it still made my skin crawl when I watched it for second time just recently.

Frogs is on video, and DVD. An extra on the DVD is the original theatrical trailer, which shows a cool quicksand death scene that never made it into the actual movie.