Director: Freddie Francis
Tagline: “From the boiling rages of a world hurled back one million years comes… Trog”
Plot: Somewhere in a sleepy corner of England, there’s a cave, a wondrous place untouched by humanity. Or so it appears to a group of three explorers who, in Trog’s near-endless opening sequence, walk to the cave, enter the cave, descend into the cave, then amble around and talk about the majesty of the cave. Then two of them strip down to their underwear to explore an underground stream leading to one of the cave’s deep recesses. And there, their troubles begin: That pocket belongs to Trog.
Who’s Trog? None other than the missing link between humans and apes, we’re later told. But really he appears to be the missing link between a Halloween costume and legitimate movie make-up. Though distributed by Warner Bros. and helmed by cult-favorite Freddie Francis—who directed horror movies when not serving as one of the world’s greatest cinematographers for Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and others—Trog features a barely passable monster. It’s hard to be too frightened of a beast that—apart from an ape mask, a bushy loincloth, and hand-me-down mukluks—looks like a paunchy key grip drafted for monster duty. But why describe the baffling ineffectiveness of Trog when you can see for yourself? Here, high-spirited anthropologist Joan Crawford, in her final role, decides to see for herself what left one of those explorers dead and the other two badly shaken: