Trog (1970)

Amateur spelunkers discover a brightly lit cave made out of painted styrofoam. While exploring, they come face to face with the most terrifying thing imaginable: a white dude in a rubber mask. After one is killed, they flee to tell the esteemed “Dr.” Brockton (Joan Crawford), who decides she needs it for a pet.

None-too-keen on a monster chillin’ in the area is real estate developer Sam Murdock (Michael Gough) whose initial plan is to loudly make disparaging remarks about the doctor and monster to anyone in his vicinity. His strategy slowly improves.

Towards the bottom of the sciency monster flick subgenre, here the good doctor wants to save the creature while ignorant and fearful townsfolk want it destroyed. Seeing how things pan out, maybe the townsfolk were right. And if they knew her research consisted entirely of watching the creature play with toys, I think they would have lynched her in the second act.

We go from a late career revival for Joan Crawford to her very last. She agreed to this film as a favor to friend Herman Cohen, whom she worked with in Berserk. I’ve seen a couple Cohen produced films, and while none were very memorable, they were better than this.

Here we have all the hallmarks of a low budget rush job. An uninventive story with poor to terrible sets and costumes, but the highlight is the supremely awful script. The dialog was clumsy and inconsistent, and the science abysmal. Brockton states in court that Trog (short for troglodyte, or cave-dweller) is the missing link, somehow woken from a state of suspended animation after millions of years, despite the lack of any evidence.

Oddly, the acting was not a weak point. Crawford, considering what she was given, didn’t phone it in. Same for Gough even though his character was entirely one note. Even Trog did a better than fair job emoting. And he was wearing a 2001 cast-off mask in serious disrepair and fuzzy cave-man slippers. Also, I will give the movie credit for one good jump scare. 

But this does not rise Trog above the genre. The story could have done something other than follow the cheap horror boilerplate, but it had no imagination. And including an animated dinosaur clip from another film doesn’t count. AMRU 2. What a way to end a career.