Frogman (2023)

Premise: You know those people who live a really sad life because they kinda peaked when they were in high school? What if I told you the main character’s claim to fame came when he was like, eight or ten or so and he accidentally caught THE FROGMAN on tape? And what if I told you the dude’s obsessed (and I mean obsessed) with THE FROGMAN and like, has people online recording annoying youtube vids laughing at him and how fake the footage looks and all that?
Yeah so the movie tells the story of how this dude, his unrequited love interest and his friend/cameraman/henchman/punchingbag combo go and try to capture THE FROGMAN on tape again! Not just on any tape, too, they’re using the same ultraold camera he used back in the day!
Under 90 minutes? Yup! About ten minutes less than that!
Do they say the title? Constantly. I mean, who wouldn’t? I wish I had an excuse to just talk about THE FROGMAN all the time.

One sentence review:

Okay, more: Charmingly dumb and campy, extremely low budget and surprisingly for the found footage genre, the spoooooky stuff starts around halfway through the movie. This is a big change considering way too many movies in this genre wait until like, the last five minutes for the actual moneyshot, so that’s cool. A good time was had by all, except I guess the people that die in the movie.
A simple way to improve it: Our main guy really doesn’t want to be in the movie for some reason, like, his two travel partners are clearly having fun and taking things as seriously as you should (that is, not seriously at all), the main character’s all like grumpy and annoyed and ugh he sucks. My suggestion would be to just get rid of him and have the movie be openly stupid from the get go.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

The soundtrack includes “Amphibian Ascending”, “Swamp Boogie” and “Frogman (The Devil’s Cry)”, all by Froglord

In case you are interested, Froglord is a doom/sludge one-man-and-some-friends-when-live band. It’s no Phyllomedusa, though, but bonus points for trying.