The 80s Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi On Streaming With A Wrestling Icon And Lots Of Lizards

Hell Comes to Frogtown has a simple premise that leaves very little room for interpretation while leaving plenty of room for one-liners – and in some cases, blistering dance routines that’ll leave you equal parts dumbfounded and awe-struck. 

The provincial government established within the fiction of Hell Comes to Frogtown captures Sam Hell after learning that he’s one of the last men in existence who hasn’t been made sterile by the nuclear fallout that decimated society at the turn of the 21st century. Nurse Spangle (Sandahl Bergman), who is overseeing the government’s repopulation efforts, forces Sam’s hand into signing a convoluted contract that involves wearing an explosive codpiece that will either shock his pelvic region or detonate depending on the severity of his insubordination. 

Though Sam will be granted a full pardon for the many crimes he committed before his capture, he’s reluctant to become a stud whose sole purpose is to help repopulate Earth by mating with as many fertile women as possible.

At this point, I feel the need to point out the irony of the fact that the only reason Sam Hell was apprehended in the first place was because of the breadcrumb trail of many pregnant women he left along his path of travel as a scavenger. What’s more, Sam and Spangle display an immediate romantic tension despite their adversarial introductions, which allows for a healthy amount of comic relief.

Sexual servitude semantics aside, the real conflict in Hell Comes to Frogtown involves a society of exiled mutant lizards who are holding a group of fertile women hostage on their compound, aptly referred to as Frogtown. The amphibious antagonists armed themselves to the teeth (read: gums) in direct defiance of the government’s firearms ban, and it’s up to Sam, Nurse Spangle, and corporal Centinella (Cec Verrell) to breach the compound, rescue the women, and put Sam’s explosive codpiece (which only flaps open during a heightened state of arousal) to work. 

GFR SCORE

The narrative framework for Hell Comes to Frogtown may seem juvenile, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well this inherently absurd premise was executed. Repopulating humanity is serious business, but this film follows all the necessary beats to make the end times as entertaining as humanly (and lizardly) possible. The internal romantic conflict between Sam and Spangle is expertly illustrated with lines like “Hey, you try making love to a complete stranger in a hostile, mutant environment, see how you like it!”, and their mutual attraction comes to a head when Spangle needs to be rescued from lizard commander Toty’s (Brian Frank) lair through use of brute force. 

Hell Comes to Frogtown is the post-apocalyptic romp through the wasteland that you need to watch if you’re a fan of the genre but need a break from the doom and gloom that’s found in series like The Last of Us or movies like 28 Days Later. I wouldn’t call this film “high art” by any stretch of the imagination, but if you’ve been looking for a mindless movie about marauding mutants hoarding precious resources to gain the upper hand over humanity, then your search is finally over. 

You can stream Hell Comes to Frogtown for free on Tubi as of this writing.