I had the incredible pleasure of speaking to “Rowdy” Roddy Piper on the phone earlier today about everything from ice cream to wrasslin’ to movies, and while I can’t publish that interview until next week, I got the wild hair to watch one his true classic acting roles for today’s installment of 73 Sports Movies in 73 Days. Brandon has had dibs on Body Slam for quite some time, and that’s fine. My first and only choice is the 1988 sci-fi film Hell Comes to Frogtown.
To be clear, this isn’t a sports movie by any means. It’s actually yet another 80s film about the collapse of society. Hey, I’m a guy who likes a specific genre. It does, however, star a professional athlete, and it’s a spectacularly bad movie that features a hilariously earnest performance for the man who paved the way for today’s WWE crossover movie stars like The Rock and Steve Austin. Hell, Piper had more Hollywood to his credit before Hulk Hogan even smelled doodie in No Holds Barred.
Hold on to your sperm counts, folks. Things are about to get really weird in here.
I haven’t watched Hell Comes to Frogtown since college, and the memory of this ridiculous plot was still a bit of a blur to me. So a few minutes into the film, I started wondering if what I was getting into was a late night Cinemex quality movie, but it turns out that it qualified for that status in acting, but hardly in nudity. You know, in case that either makes or breaks a movie for you. But it’s still NSFW in case you want to watch it on YouTube right here.
Hell Comes to Frogtown doesn’t take place in any specific year, as we’re simply told that it’s “the latter days of the 20th century,” so this one probably took place at some point during 2000. Obviously, this one missed the mark as well, but the Cold War theme of an impending nuclear holocaust was just as prevalent in Frogtown as it was in so many other 80s movies. In this apocalyptic scenario, the world’s leaders launched a few nukes at each other and thought, “Hey, this is no big deal” and then everyone either died or became mutant frog people.
A second nuclear attack then rendered the majority of men and women infertile, which meant that humans were becoming extinct. Therefore, a government agency known as MedVac is desperately seeking any man that is carrying a loaded babymaker and any woman with a quality womb. And the man with the highest sperm count in all the land is Sam Hell.
Hell’s about to be murdered by some army guy because he thinks Hell assaulted his daughter, but Hell swears he didn’t. It doesn’t matter because MedVac has ordered him kept alive and unharmed, because they need to harvest his seed and send him out to rescue and impregnate five fertile women who were kidnapped by the evil Commander Toty in Frogtown. Naturally, to protect Hell’s goods, they slap a chastity belt on him that will shock him if he tries to escape and explode if he runs too far.
Paired with a hot nurse trained in the art of seductive dancing – not kidding – Hell hits the road to invade Frogtown and rescue the girls. If he tries to escape, not only will the nurse shock his balls, but he’ll also be gunned down by smoking hot machine gun girl. I’m retroactively in love.
The hot nurse – played by Sandahl Bergman, who seemed poised to become a female action star in the 80s after Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja, but God knows what happened – has also been instructed to basically keep Hell aroused, so she starts dancing seductively for him (remember, she’s an expert) and he thinks, “What the heck?” and tries to get his, but then she shocks his balls. This is what Roddy Piper looks like when his balls are shocked.
After machine gun babe tries to get some of Hell’s legendary loving, they hit the road and immediately find one of the fertile girls out in the desert after she escaped Toty. She doesn’t trust the nurse and Hell, so the nurse shoots her up with some ecstasy and orders Hell to get to the baby making. Except… no, it’s nothing. It’s just… the nurse thought that maybe there was something between them, that’s all.
After they send the newly pregnant random girl on her way, they get back in their inconspicuous pink car and continue toward Frogtown, which is super dangerous, so smoking hot machine gun babe needs to be ready at all times.
Seriously, someone invent time travel so I can go back to 1988 and have a restraining order slapped against me.
Now that they’ve found Frogtown, the nurse tells Hell that he has to pretend that he’s her captor, so she shackles herself in some S&M gear and they make toward the first frog nightclub that they see, because that’s presumably where their frog contact is.
Everyone in Frogtown looks like a frog, and this guy’s reading “The Frog Prince” because RIBBIT RIBBIT FROG FROG. Eventually, Hell runs into his old friend Looney Tunes who is in Frogtown mining for uranium, because everyone wants to buy it up to build the next nuclear bomb. Looney introduces them to Leroy, who wants to make a trade for Hell’s hot slave.
The only problem is that Leroy isn’t allowed to make private trades in Frogtown, not without Toty’s permission, and Toty’s enforcer, Bull, shows up to remind him of this.
Bull then takes the hot nurse away and that leaves Hell to work with the frog stripper to find Toty and take him down. Before they do that, though, frog stripper wants a little piece of Hell, too, because everyone has heard that he knows how to please a lady.
I’m not going to lie, I kinda wanted to see some frog boobies. We got duck boobies in Howard the Duck, so why not some frog boobies in Frogtown?
Toty’s a pissed off Commander and he doesn’t have any time for the nurse’s hot nonsense, so unless she can pull off the mysterious “Dance of the Three Snakes,” he’s going to eat her for dinner. That’s a lot of pressure, but he leaves the harem (that the nurse is there to rescue) to warm her up and get her aroused for the sexy dance.
Hell, on the other hand, is kidnapped and tortured by Bull, who wants his crotch bomb for himself so he can steal the human technology and develop more weapons. He removes the belt from Hell with a chainsaw without harming the human at all, of course, but then the bomb blows up in his face and kills him.
Frog stripper shows up to untie Hell, but she tries one more time to get a little human action and he denies her again. Because he wouldn’t quickly have sex with her, she leads him out of the room and is immediately stabbed in the chest by Bull, who wasn’t dead after all. I think this raises a great moral question – if it means saving a frog stripper’s life, would you have sex with her?
The nurse still has no clue what the “Dance of the Three Snakes” is but she somehow successfully pulls it off, and Toty reveals that the three snakes are his three penises. I assume that’s how he got to be in charge of Frogtown, because when anyone was like, “Hey, why are you in charge,” he’d respond, “Because I have three penises, obviously.”
Before Toty can sex the nurse with his three dongs, Hell shows up and rescues her. Also, someone named Count Sodom was there selling arms to the frog people, but we don’t know anything about him. He wears a gas mask and has human hands. If you’re even remotely smart or mostly sober, you should know who he actually is by this point.
Anyway, Hell and the nurse find the harem and they all make a big break for it in the pink tank car, but they’re all sad because Looney was shot and eventually killed while they were all making the escape. They probably had a good 15 to 20 minute head start on Toty and his troops, but this is technically a future wasteland, so I don’t know how cars work and Toty caught up rather quickly.
After a chase that featured impressively accurate mortar shots from a moving vehicle, the nurse and Hell manage to lose Toty, but not before Count Sodom arrives and threatens to shoot them all with a rocket.
Oh snap, it’s that inconsequential guy from the beginning of the film that swore he’d eventually kill Hell. Who would have ever thought that he’d make it back around in the plot to attempt to get some revenge? Of course, like most villains in the 80s and 90s, Sodom talks way too much before actually trying to kill someone and Hell throws a samurai sword through his chest. It’s pretty rad.
But nobody gets to rest because Toty is still alive and he wants to have a battle to the death with Hell after we’re led to believe that he killed all of the women by blowing up their Mary Kay car.
Hell tries to end Toty quickly with his new rocket launcher, but it’s a dud, so the two chase each other up the rocks and they fight to the bitter end with their bare fists. What Toty doesn’t know, though, is that this is Roddy Piper we’re talking about and he’ll do anything to win, including… EYE GOUGE!
That stuns Toty and allows Hell to throw him over the cliff, and that’s just bittersweet, because Hell thinks that his babe and the fertile babes are all dead. Fortunately, they weren’t. They were hiding after they heard the explosion, and they were too chicken to go help Hell against Toty. He forgives the nurse, though, because they love each other, awwwwww.
She loves him, too, so they vow to take a little vacation together so they can do some of their own impregnating. But only after he does his job and gets the fertile babes pregnant!
Haha, love in a nuclear wasteland!
