Frogman Returns at Chattanooga Film Festival, 19 June 2026
In a way, there are always returns with Frogman. In Anthony Cousins’ found-footage feature debut Frogman (2023), Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) returned to Loveland, Ohio with his friends Amy (Chelsey Grant) and Scotty (Benny Barrett) to try to capture on camera the legendary local cryptid that Dallas had seen there as a child – and after various fakeouts and false starts, they uncovered not just a conspiratorial cult of (semi-)human worshippers claiming descendance from the creature, but the oversized, wand-wielding batrachian god himself.
“Are you filming Frogman 2?”, asks Amy, unhappily reunited with Dallas in Loveland for a sequel and noticing that he is now being followed by camera girl Lucy (Natalie Tran) and producer Bridget (Alexis Allotta). “It’s not what it looks like,” Dallas insists. For following the underground success of his film(-within-a-film) Frogman, with its documentary proof that monsters exist, Dallas has now reluctantly been recruited by ambitious, awful Bridget into hosting television series Chasing Cryptids, even as Amy’s own acting career has flatlined – and she still has not forgiven Dallas for letting Scotty metamorphose into a human-frog cross.
Now Dallas is no longer making an amateur film with friends, but has become part of a professional crew with high-end gear and body cams – and that might describe Frogman Returns too, which plays an excellent sequel game by revisiting scenes and tropes from the first film while going deeper and harder and further – with a notably bigger budget – and yet somehow staying true to the original’s trademark humour and gonzo absurdity. Here we have a whole menagerie of odd-as-fuck otherworldly creatures, showcasing a history of movie monsterdom and its modes of expression: some (e.g. the weeping, porcine ‘squonk’) are physically modelled puppets; others (like the Fresno ‘nightcrawlers’) are rendered in freakily photoreal CGI; and the slimy, slobbering Frogman himself (played by Tom Ringberg and voiced by celebrated screenwriter C. Robert Cargill) remains a man in a very basic-looking frog costume, harking back to the era of rubber-suited monsters led by Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla (1954).
The best sequels retread familiar materials while switching the genre frame to bring in fresh and unpredictable perspectives – like James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) pivoting from sci-fi horror to action. The original Frogman was already somewhat generically unstable with its heady blend of faux reportage, ‘cult’ cinema elements and unexpectedly sexualised monster mayhem (the repeated catchphrase “Frogman fucks” is no mere metaphor in the aptly named Loveland). For the sequel, Cousins, reuniting with regular co-writer John Karsko, still has nervous teams crawling through the tunnels beneath the city in search of an amphibious alien and its hybrid kin – but by the end this goes full Evil Dead II (1987), opening a portal to a whole other dimension (think the cheesy stop-motion wasteland of Saturn’s moon Titan in Beetlejuice, 1988), and to a different genre where Dallas morphs into a Reagan-era super-soldier-y he-man hero, and where, in an expressly mooted second sequel, almost anything could happen. No doubt, Frogman will return (again).
The only film that comes close to this in theme and format is Adam Green’s Digging Up The Marrow (2014), but Frogman Returns, while referencing many other things, remains very much its own thing: a weird, metacinematic trip into a subterranean world of psychic/psychedelic flotsam and jetsam spawned from the spirit of straight-to-video Eighties schlock. It is also funny, strange and satisfying from grounded beginning to out-there end.
strap: Anthony Cousins’ funny, freaky found-footage sequel once again pits man against monster in smalltown Ohio and way, way beyond.
© Anton Bitel
