If cinema were a landfill, Trog would be the stained mattress that somehow keeps getting rediscovered by film students who mistake mildew for meaning. Directed by Freddie Francis—who clearly lost a bet or just stopped caring somewhere around scene two—and starring a sleepwalking, vodka-powered Joan Crawford in her final screen role, Trog is the kind of cinematic experience that makes you question whether art should be protected or euthanized.
This is a movie where science fiction, horror, and soap opera all meet in a back alley and beat each other unconscious with a rubber club. And by “rubber club,” I do mean the title character, a prehistoric man-creature with the face of a peeled potato and the wardrobe of a caveman-themed Halloween party that ran out of money.
The Plot: Evolution’s Embarrassment
Trog opens with three thrill-seeking spelunkers stumbling into a cave system somewhere in England and encountering what appears to be a reject from a Sid & Marty Krofft puppet show. One man dies, another ends up in shock, and the third escapes to tell the tale of a “creature” that looks suspiciously like a community theater actor wearing furry gloves and a deep sense of shame.
Enter Dr. Brockton, played by Joan Crawford, who is introduced in a lab coat so crisp it might as well be made of asbestos. Dr. Brockton is a renowned anthropologist—or at least the script tells us she is. In practice, she looks like she’s performing community service in a zoo exhibit, chain-smoking between takes while debating whether this or Straight-Jacket was the low point of her career.
Dr. Brockton captures the creature—dubbed “Trog” because subtlety died years before this script was written—and decides to study him. And by “study,” I mean she locks him in a lab and treats him with all the warmth and nuance of someone trying to housetrain a raccoon with rabies. Trog, it turns out, is the last surviving troglodyte. He’s got the mind of a toddler, the manners of a drunk uncle, and the fashion sense of a Flintstones villain.
Joan Crawford: One Martini from Murder
Crawford deserves her own paragraph here. The legend. The eyebrow-archer. The woman who once told off Bette Davis by doing nothing more than showing up and existing. In Trog, she’s reduced to giving wide-eyed monologues to a guy in a mask who looks like he’s about to mug a papier-mâché mammoth.
This is a woman who used to make every scene feel like a showdown at high noon. In Trog, she’s reduced to saying lines like, “He’s responding to the colors!” as if she’s narrating an acid trip for toddlers. There’s a rumor she was sloshed through most of the shoot, and watching the way she fumbles her lines and stares into the void, you start to suspect it wasn’t wine she was sniffing from those beakers.
Still, she commits. God help her, she tries. It’s like watching a queen trapped in a sandbox, performing Shakespeare for sock puppets.
The Monster: Hairy, Huggy, and Homicidal
Trog himself is one of the most laughable monsters ever committed to film, and I’m including the time Doctor Whofought a giant rubber chicken. The makeup is astonishingly bad—his face is fixed in a perma-snarl that reads less “prehistoric terror” and more “hungover dog wearing a wig.”
His behavior fluctuates wildly between curiosity and murder, which makes sense because the script was clearly written by someone whose evolutionary knowledge came from cereal boxes. One minute he’s playing with toys like a six-year-old, the next he’s killing butchers and kidnapping children.
The film actually has the nerve to try and teach him to speak using cue cards and puppets. There’s even a scene where he’s shown footage of dinosaurs and responds by going berserk, throwing a tantrum that somehow results in the film’s one and only moment of excitement. And by excitement, I mean mild property damage and a lot of running in circles.
Supporting Cast: Paycheck Hunters
Everyone else in this movie acts like they’re auditioning for a public access show about fossils. There’s a stock villain businessman who wants Trog destroyed because… well, that’s what 1970s villains do. He wears suits and makes angry pronouncements and eventually becomes Trog chow after breaking into the lab and letting the beast loose, because poetic justice in this movie comes with a rubber glove and a low budget.
Trog goes on a rampage that involves throwing a dog, smashing a doll, and abducting a child—all while the police, scientists, and half of England look on with the kind of confusion usually reserved for tax season. The military eventually steps in and, in what can only be described as mercy for the audience, guns Trog down like a bad idea whose time has finally run out.
The Direction: When in Doubt, Zoom Out
Freddie Francis was no amateur—he won Academy Awards for cinematography—but he must’ve directed this with one eye on the clock and the other on a plane ticket out of the country. The pacing is glacial. The scenes drag. Half the movie is people talking in rooms lit like a funeral home. And when the action does finally arrive, it’s filmed with the energy of a school safety video.
There’s a lot of talk about science in this film. About man’s origins and evolution. But don’t be fooled—this is a monster movie with a cheap coat of anthropology thrown on top, like trying to make a bologna sandwich sound classy by calling it “artisanal cured meat.”
Final Thoughts: A Fossil of a Film
Trog is the cinematic equivalent of a museum exhibit that hasn’t been dusted since the Nixon administration. It’s an artifact of what happens when a studio, a star, and a director all give up at the same time—but decide to make a movie anyway. The result is strangely hypnotic, like watching a car skid slowly into a pond of expired yogurt.
Joan Crawford deserved better. Hell, cinema deserved better. But for all its sins—its bad makeup, worse dialogue, and prehistoric pacing—Trog has a certain charm. The charm of watching a flaming clown car somersault into a ravine. You can’t look away. And maybe, just maybe, somewhere deep down… you don’t want to.
Trog lives. But please, don’t let him come back.
