Main cast: Nathan Tymoshuk (Dallas Kyle), Chelsey Grant (Amy Matheson), Benny Barrett (Scotty Fontaine), Toussaint Morrison (Dallas’s Brother in Law), Ali Daniels (The Egg Girl), Chris Canfield (Jeremy J), Brandon Santiago (Woody), Michael Paul Levin (Sherrif Rhodes), Jack Neveaux (George Hale), Chari Eckmann (Gretel), and Arden Michalec (Natalie)
Director: Anthony Cousins
When he was a kid, Dallas Kyle manages to capture on video what appears to be the mythical Frogman itself. No, that’s not a guy in a diving suit, it’s a frog monster, alright.
Sadly, in the next 25-years, Dallas ends up being quite a loser. He never makes it as a famous film director like he’d hoped, and his footage of Frogman is ridiculed online as a bad hoax.
Well, what is a man to do in such a circumstance? Gather his buddies, Amy and Scotty, to go back to Loveland, Ohio, and find video evidence that the Frogman does exist, of course!
Frogman is a found footage film, something that I normally enjoy as much as I love getting my tooth drilled without anesthesia, but I’m told that this one has, well, a Frogman and for some reason I am led to believe that this one is also some Lovecraft-ian thing. Must be the frog thing… anyway, I fall for the hype, so I guess I only have myself to blame.
This one is basically The Blair Frog Project, but it doesn’t know whether it wants to be a more serious kind of scary or just campy instead. It tries to be both, but ends up just making Dallas Kyle an unlikely, snotty prat that is hard to like, much less root for.
The biggest issues here, though, are typical ones that plague way too many formulaic found footage films.
One, the camera has no reason to be rolling all the times, but it does, thus making everyone here appear to be full blown terminal narcissists.
Two, the camera definitely has no reason to be running when everyone should be fleeing or terrified, thus making the person holding the camera a terminal moron that deserves what is coming to them.
Three, too much time is spent on the main characters doing koochee-coo how-is-everyone nonsense. I get it, these scenes are meant to humanize these characters, to get me to root for them, but these characters are barely-developed, awkward pastiches, so for the most part I am bored and impatient to see them all die.
Additional issues include the Frogman being a lame cryptid, both in the lore behind it and its appearance, cringe-emanating contrived plot developments like the froggy somehow having the powers to make the camera black out when it’s convenient and teleporting all over the place, and some key scenes that make me laugh for all the wrong reasons.
I have to give this one one thing though: at least it tries to have a proper ending of sorts, instead of just having the camera die out in the final scene, just before the monster’s face shows up for a final jump scare and other done to death clichés.
Still, that doesn’t change the fact that this whole thing suffers from its low budget, flimsy script, and patchy pacing that leaves me bored for the most part. Perhaps the people behind this thing should have tried a little harder, instead of using “But… but… this is a found footage film so it should be like this!” as an excuse for its many shortcomings.
