The Blair Witch Project’s influence on the horror genre is difficult to overstate. The 1999 film’s gargantuan box office haul — then an indie film record — from a miniscule production budget had studios seeing green and led to what was described by The A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias as found footage becoming as important to horror in the ‘00s and ‘10s as slashers were to the ’80s and ‘90s.
At the time, the film was compelling to so many audiences due to the belief by many that what they were viewing onscreen was genuine. A quarter of a decade and scores of found footage horror flicks later, nobody is fooled by these onscreen claims of authenticity anymore, and the novelty of this once lucrative film technique has certainly worn off. The Blair Witch Project is a more polarizing film today, in part, because of the oversaturation of the technique it may not have pioneered (that would be 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust, at least for horror) but certainly popularized. And yet, unlike the fictional legend of a forest-dwelling witch in the made-up Maryland town of Blair, 2023 found footage flick Frogman, which apes The Blair Witch Project as well as Bobcat Goldthwait’s 2013 bigfoot film Willow Creek, is based on a real legend in a real town.
In Ohio, the legend of the Loveland frog — a four-foot-tall, humanoid amphibian that has in some accounts been said to carry a spark-spewing wand — dates as far back as 1955. The town celebrates this lore with an annual festival, souvenir shops and frogman serving as its town mascot. Anthony Cousins’ Frogman film borrows the description of the cryptid and its location, but he reconstrues the history around the sightings. While, within the film, there was an older photo of the creature, the frogman’s definitive sighting, in its own version of the Zapruder film, was captured in 1999 by a young boy (Liam Hage) while on a family road trip. As his parents bicker, he and his sister hear strange noises in the nearby woods and spot what appears to be a giant amphibian.
This grainy opening scene then clashes with a cut to a garish and crystal-clear modern-day video of a YouTube personality calling bullshit on the frogman legend while mocking the failed filmmaker that the boy grew up to be. We then meet washed-up man, Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk), now an unemployed thirtysomething mooching off his sister. While eating breakfast at 2 p.m., he’s told by his brother-in-law that after two years in the guest room, he needs to find a new place to stay, prompting him to dig the ole camcorder out of a dusty box and get his college amateur-filmmaking gang back together to prove frogman exists once and for all.
Though the film is a slight 77 minutes – brevity being a merciful aspect of many found footage movies that tend toward shaky-cam sequences – the first 50 spend far too much time on meandering melodrama between this trio of old friends. Dallas convinces the hesitant Scotty (Benny Barrett), who works as a barista and has had his artistic outlet reduced to shooting wedding videos for cash, to join up when they attend a going-away party for Dallas’ old crush, Amy (Chelsey Grant). She’s an aspiring actress who’s moving to Hollywood because she doesn’t want to end up doing local commercials for the rest of her life.
None of these characters are particularly appealing, and the performances leave a lot to be desired. While Dallas is fixated on finally proving his doubters wrong, Amy and Scotty mostly just goof off, with Amy adopting a grating Southern belle persona for Dallas’ documentary, which he resents. There’s the requisite didn’t-realize-the-camera-was-still-rolling moments where Dallas and Amy pretend in a heart-to-heart that the one time that they hooked up years ago was meaningless to each of them, and Scotty tries to convince Dallas to tell her how he really feels. Slightly better are their brief interactions and interviews with the Loveland townsfolk, reminiscent of both The Blair Witch Project and Willow Creek. Here we learn that not only can frogman read minds, but yes, frogman also fucks.
The trio lodges at a hotel with a frogman gift shop that includes such gimmicky items as a “swamp water” beverage and a “frogman droppings” snack, which the one-track-minded Dallas scoffs at, and Amy and Scotty find endearing. Notably, Dallas does shell out his limited dough to buy a frog-shaped flute purported to summon the amphibious cryptid. When the hotelier, Gretel (Chari Eckmann), gives them a map to Frogman Point, a local tourist attraction renowned for sightings, they head over and almost instantly chase down the creature. Problem is, he turns out to be the gift shop employee (Brandon Santiago) they interacted with earlier, who gets paid to traipse around the woods in a rubber frog mask to scare tourists. With Scotty and Amy wanting to heed the threats Gretel makes toward Dallas when he confronts her about these shenanigans, Dallas convinces them to seek out George (Jack Neveaux), the local man who took the first frogman photo, to get some answers.
Though the glitchy climax (frogman evidently affects technology in addition to reading minds) may be off-putting to those who got nauseous from The Blair Witch Project, there’s a grab bag of earnestly presented found footage tropes as the whole thing blows up into a big spectacle that makes the final 30 minutes nearly outrageous enough to redeem its sluggish start. We’ve got a cult of frogman worshippers, a human bride blessed to have “healthy pollywogs,” body horror metamorphosis and creature effects that, though silly, are a hell of a lot of fun. While finally showing the eponymous crone in Blair Witch (2016) actually sapped that sequel of much of the original film’s mystique, and Willow Creek benefited from not depicting a sasquatch onscreen, here it feels crucially correct to show the frogman, at least in brief glimpses, in order to play up the absurdity of it all, even though Cousins’ film never quite fully leans in to its comedic elements.
This occasional air of seriousness is compounded by a final scene a year later where Dallas, having lost one of his friends to amphibious transformation and the other to estrangement, stares intensely ahead as he’s being summoned to the stage to be interviewed; what we’ve just watched is meant to be the documentary that he successfully completed to prove frogman is real. In doing so, Frogman opens itself up to critique of such plot holes as why Dallas, obsessed with the creature, has never previously revisited Loveland again since his childhood, or why nobody in the town knows who he is despite his footage being a major reason why the legend persists. Hell, even that random YouTuber knows the guy’s whole amateurish creative history.
It’s riddled with flaws, especially early on, but as a cryptid-based, recently released found footage flick, Frogman is still worth a midnight movie watch. The real Loveland frog may have just been a sickly, tailless iguana, as the man behind one of the primary sightings claimed after he went back out there and killed the thing. But that’s no fun, and at least this film’s over-the-top third act mostly is, even if unlike many of its found footage forebears, unfortunately not all the borderline insufferable main characters croak.
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