by: Dr. Boogie

...CONTINUED

Ah, so there were explosives in the belt. They just weren't quite as tamper-sensitive as we were led to believe. I'll bet that whole "electronic lock" was a big lie, and that it was really just a pair of plastic briefs that he was afraid to take off.

Now, Sam is freeballing, and the sky's the limit. Arabella is finally able to extract herself from the garbage pile, and she shows up to untie Sam. If I were her, I'd have brought Sam a helmet so he wouldn't accidentally knock himself out again while walking out of the torture chamber. She did bring the burlap sack, but that's just not the same.'

Anyway, it turns out Bull is alive, and he stabs her with a giant drill bit. Sam takes that very drill bit and stabs Bull with it, and now we're down two important characters. Granted, they were only on screen for about five minutes each, but they were still an important part of the Frogtown arc of this epic story.

Meanwhile, Spangle has just narrowly survived her harrowing ordeal, having been waved at and fanned lightly by a group of passives. They claimed to be preparing her so that she would survive "The Dance of the Three Snakes." What is this strange ritual? They never get the chance to explain before Spangle is hauled before Commander Toty. He insists that she perform that very dance, but has no explanation for what it could be.

So she just starts doing whatever. A little of this, a little of that. Then she remembers the advice of one of the passives: "remember this passion". Well I don't need to tell you what that means. It means she continues the same random routine, only with slightly more enthusiasm. It must be working because Toty starts gurgling and groaning as he watches.

Suddenly, the meaning behind the name becomes all too clear.

"You have aroused the Three Snakes!"

The music winds down, and the tension builds in the seconds before the big reveal.

I bet you thought you were going to see a lapful of something, eh? Nope, the director didn't think we needed to see Commander Toty's trident. That one shot could've made "Hell Comes to Frogtown" and turned it into "that cult movie with the three-headed frog penis". What a missed opportunity.

The intense sheet training Spangle underwent fails to prepare her for the horror. She gives each individual snake a swift kick, then prepares to be gunned down by Toty's guards.

"Eat lead, froggies!"

I heard that line was cut from the French translation of the film.

Sam busts in and shots everyone, except for Toty, who leaps up to a catwalk and runs off. She's fine, he's fine, everyone's fine. They return to the passives' cell to bust them out, and Toty... hides, I guess. He doesn't put his guards on alert, or try to ambush our heroes. I suppose he was busy icing down his bruised snake sacks.

While all this has been going on, Lonny managed to fire off a flare that serves as signal for Centinella to move in.

Rather than park in a secluded spot and enter on foot, Centinella pulls up to the front gate (I guess; from the outside, the place looks pretty uninhabited) and trains her machine gun on the guards with a special hand crank. Given that she never leaves the car, and that the gun can be aimed by the driver, I have to wonder if Centinella was ever really necessary for this particular mission.

She leans on the horn as a signal to Sam and the others. And presumably every guard in the entire city.

Toty finally reappears with some guards near the exit. Things look grim for our heroes, until Lonny (and not Centinella, let me point out) comes to the rescue. He somehow disables the entire squad of armed frogs with his flare gun. Forget guns, Sam should've just walked into Frogtown with a handful of M80s. He could've been the new chief by now.

Sam and Spangle load the scantily-clad passives into the shaggin' wagon and get ready to roll out. Just before they do, however, Lonny limps out of the building, clearly in pain but with no signs of injury on him. They toss him in with the rest of the ladies, but he drops his flare gun on the way out! Now what are they going to do if they need to repel any hostile mutants?

The bad news just keeps coming. Apparently, that tattered hat was the only thing holding his brains in his head. He quickly dies once he has a chance to lie down. It's just slightly more tragic than Arabella's death, as we only knew Lonny for about as long as we knew her. Also, Sam has a sword now. No idea when he picked it up, but he has one now. You'll need to know that for later.

Centinella spots trouble on the horizon. It's Commander Toty, and he brought the company car.

A racing truck with a cannon in the passenger's seat? Hey, why not? They line up their shot and fire, at which point the tremendous vibration blows the lightweight truck to pieces and scatters its passengers across the desert. Nah, I'm just kidding. It works surprisingly well considering that they can't hit anything unless they're driving toward it.

Spangle says that she can lose them by going through the mountains. This seems unlikely, as they are traveling along the only road in the area and that pink van doesn't look like it would do that well off road. Nevertheless, the absurd plan works and they ditch their pursuers...

Just in time to run into an ambush. It's the dastardly Count Sodom. No one knows why he chose to reenact this scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he couldn't have picked a worse moment. What is this guy's deal? Why is he selling guns to the mutants, and why does he give a rat's ass about Sam? Is it because Sam accidentally fell on a crate of his guns in an earlier scene? The answer may surprise you.

Count Sodom is none other than Fred Ward, and he's not a gun runner; he's just doing research for his upcoming film, "Tremors 5: The Worm has Turned".

Seriously, though, it's Captain Devlin, the angry army guy with the raspy voice. He hates Sam and Spangle so much that he wanted to pull them over long enough to explain why he's selling guns to the mutants at Frogtown: "this used to be a man's world, Sam, but now there are too many women. They've got us by the short hairs." He goes onto say that he traded with the mutants for their uranium, which he then gave to "renegade scientists for processing" to make a nuclear device. I have no idea why he's turning to Sam for sympathy. At one point, he wanted to castrate Sam with a bottle for sexually assaulting his daughter, but now he's hoping Sam will understand why he had to enact a plan that easily could've been written by Tucker Max.

While he's ranting, Sam convinces one of the passive to hand him the sword he picked up at some earlier point. She obliges, and he gives it a toss.

Now that's a Hell of a toss! Get it? See, because he and his name and... meh.

That just leaves Commander Toty and his underlings in the...

Oh man, come on. He yanked that sword out and took off. He couldn't have gone far, though. I mean, look at that stain on the rocks. I think I can see some brain mixed in with that red paint.

Beyond another big rock, Sad finds Devlin face first in the dirt, with the slow rising and falling of his chest a sure sign that he's really dead. It's lucky for Sam that he happens to scuff the dirt as he's lining up his RPG for one last shot.

Now he's dead for sure, and Sam has a new RPG he can use on that pesky truck.

Unfortunately, Spangle's plan to lose Toty by driving up the mountain road didn't pan out quite like she thought it would. The flaming wreckage of the pink Med Tech van can attest to that. Now he'll never get to impregnate that gaggle of passives. Toty's truck rolls up to investigate, though, so at least he'll get an opportunity to blast him to bits.

He gets their attention and convinces them to drop their guns. The henchmen scatter, leaving Toty to take the full force of the rocket blast.

Ooh, that's a spirit breaker. Fortunately, he still has his pistol. Unfortunately, he uses all the bullets shooting wildly at Toty. Thankfully, he doesn't do anything stupid like run away and almost fall off a cliff. Oh wait, he did that, too.

Thankfully, he doesn't fall off, nor does Toty pick up his gun and shoot Sam. Instead, Toty charges him and knocks the sword out of his hand so the two of them can have a nice knock-down, drag-out brawl.

What follows is a fight that isn't even half as long as Piper's fight in "They Live", and yet it is somehow twice as silly and undignified, culminating in this esoteric judo move:

That's the real turning point in the fight. After that, Sam is able to throw Toty around much more easily, and finally manages to toss him over the cliff. He grabs Sam's leg, but Sam is finally able to grab that mystery sword. He cuts off Toty's hand, Toty falls, the hand magically reappears on his wrist, and then he's dead.

Thank god those three snakes of his didn't tumble out in the fight.

With the bad guy gone, Sam goes back to examine the burning, corpse-less wreck of the van. A thought occurs that there is a notable lack of bodies around the wrecked vehicle, but what could it mean? Before Sam can think about it, Spangle and the others pop out from behind a rock.

They hid, Spangle explains, when they saw Toty's truck coming. Sam makes a big stink about it and tries to goad a shock out of Spangle. Hey, he stuck around to save her even without the belt on! He's a swell guy, they kiss, aww.

The women pile into Toty's truck, and then Sam does something really unexpected.

He gives Centinella a pendant that has a picture of his dead daughter inside. Of course, Centinella doesn't know that. He only told the story to Spangle. He gives her the pendant so she'll have, "something to hang onto... when you're alone." Centinella looks confused, and I don't blame her. They barely know each other, and here he is, giving her the only picture he has of his daughter (the one he cared about, that is; not any of the other kids he conceived and abandoned). That has to be a little awkward, but Centinella puts it on anyway. If nothing else, the picture of that little girl will remind her of the man whose bones she tried to jump that one night.

All's well that ends well. As Columbo would say, there's just one more thing...

Spangle reminds him that he still needs to get those passives knocked up. Not in the truck, though; not enough trunk space. Sam reflects on his new girlfriend's willingness to get him laid as he drives off into the sunset.

Boy, what a movie. What surprised me the most was how little nudity there was in this movie. I mean, the plot was that Sam Hell had been recruited by the government to, in his own words, "fuck for freedom." You'd think there would be T 'n A in every direction, but no. Centinella briefly went topless, but that was both the beginning and the end of nudity in the movie. And we didn't even get to see Commander Toty's three-pronged unit, even after all that build-up! This movie is horseshit!

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