Really Bad Movies With Which To End A Great Career - Joan Crawford – Trog

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A Hollywood Giant who made some pretty rum career choices for her later movie appearances; including a late appearance in a Man From UNCLE movie, The Karate Killers, (actually two TV episodes cobbled together). Trog (1970) really is the pits though, as Crawford plays an anthropologist who struggles to tame and protect a discovered and captured cave dwelling Neanderthal Troglodyte, who inevitably breaks loose and goes on a murderous rampage. This one has stock footage of crap-dinosaurs cribbed from other B-movies, an actor (Joe Cornelius) who looks as if he is suffocating in his ape mask (apparently stolen from the set of Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey) and a desperate effort by the cast to take the whole farrago completely seriously. Crawford struggles to act with scientific authority while talking abject nonsense, trying to get her precious pet Trog to appreciate classical music, before hearing jazz freaks him out. Old and traditional conservative – good. Young, hip and cool improvisational liberal mindedness – bad. That seems to be the rather suspect moral to this dreadful hokum. Crawford spends much of the manhunt running round woods and polystyrene caverns shouting ‘Trog’ as if summoning a lost puppy. Her Mommie knows best caring stance for the murderous child-abducting monster is rather ironic given the ‘Mommie Dearest’ revelations of her cruelty to her own family that would emerge right after her death. At times, Crawford slurs her lines indicating that she was drunk while filming, and given what she was doing, who could blame her? Crawford was at her best fighting with Bette Davis in 1962’s Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, though she was overshadowed both in character and acting stakes by her co-star. In Trog, it is Crawford who dominates the movie with her overwhelming presence revealing her as a great actress in terminal decline overshadowing one of the most pathetic of all movie monsters. Youtube the movie’s official trailer Arthur Chappell