Review: Frog Dreaming

Cody (Henry Thomas) is an American teen living with his father’s old buddy Gazza (Tony Barry) in Australia (it was filmed in Victoria) after the death of his parents. Cody likes to modify things like his BMX bike so it’ll get him to school faster. Because he’s a weirdo who actually wants to get to school faster. Seriously, why would anyone want that? It certainly doesn’t impress local lawman John Ewart, who pleads with Gazza to get the kid into line. Anyway, Cody and a couple of local sisters (Rachel Friend and Tamsin West) are fooling around in a lake where Cody swears he has seen and felt something lurking in the water. Talking to a local indigenous person or two, he learns that the creature may be a mythical ‘Donkejin’, and becomes obsessed with getting a good look at it. Katy Manning turns up as the girls’ mother.

Some films from your childhood you never forget. Either they’ve become favourites you watch well into adulthood (or you at least fondly recall), or something about the experience in watching them was memorable (For me that category would include such torturous cinema-going experiences as “Return to Oz” or “Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey”). However, occasionally you get a film like “Frog Dreaming” (AKA “The Quest”), a Brian Trenchard-Smith flick from 1986 that I saw when it was first released on video in the 80s and hadn’t seen or thought about it in the 30+ years since. Part of that is because it doesn’t crop up on TV much, no doubt. Watching it again in 2017 though, I have to say the main reason for my largely forgetting about it is because it’s completely forgettable. In fact, that may be a little bit charitable on my part. It’s a pretty piss-poor effort in what was actually an otherwise profitable year for Australian films, due to the success of “Crocodile Dundee”. This ain’t no “Crocodile Dundee”, folks. I saw a helluva lot of films in the period between 1985-1988, but my inability to recall much about this film really is mostly on the film itself.

Scripted by Everett De Roche, it’s an uninteresting and unsuccessful blend of “E.T: The Extra Terrestrial”, “BMX Bandits” and aboriginal mythology from a very pre-PC time. Yeah, this one doesn’t play well now and probably didn’t play all that much better at the time, either. Don’t forget that although he directed the fun Aussie/HK Kung-Fu flick “The Man From Hong Kong”, Mr. Trenchard-Smith also gave us “BMX Bandits”, “Turkey Shoot”, “Leprechaun 4: In Space”, “Strike of the Panther”, and “Day of the Panther”. Screenwriter Everett De Roche has a bit more cred (I liked “Razorback” and “Roadgames”), but he too has been responsible for writing some crap over the years (“Patrick” and “Snapshot”). So we’re not talking about terribly reliable people here, and this for all money looks like an attempt at mixing a couple of then-fashionable things (BMX bikes, young American import Henry Thomas) with some poorly integrated Indigenous mythology in the hopes of simply making a buck. The result is a film unlikely to please anyone, especially in today’s climate. The attempt at using “E.T.” star Thomas for marquee value proves useless when the poor kid turned out to frankly not be terribly good an actor nor did he have much charisma (Not to mention the story is so utterly Australian I’d imagine overseas audiences wouldn’t make heads or tails of it for the most part). Aussie TV veteran and journalist Rachel Friend and co-star Tamsin West give slightly better performances, but somewhat in the vicinity of Aussie kids TV show level. Hell, even veteran character actor Tony Barry has been much better elsewhere. The best performance by far comes from John Ewart as the local copper but he’s hardly being stretched here.

There’s excellent flora and fauna on show and Brian May (“Mad Max”, “Gallipoli”, “Turkey Shoot”, “The Killing of Angel Street”) gives us one of his best scores to date. Trenchard-Smith also manages to conjure up a lot of eerie atmosphere for what is essentially a juvenile fantasy. It’s well-lit and well-shot by John R. McLean (“The Cars That Ate Paris”, “Turkey Shoot”), with an underwater assist by Ron Taylor (who shot shark footage for “Jaws” and “Jaws 2”). Sadly the story and characters aren’t up to snuff and all the BMX stuff comes off awfully quaint now. With swearing kids and elements of fantasy I guess this wanted to be an Aussie version of “The Goonies”, but the script is a bore. There’s nothing remarkable or interesting about the basic story or any of the characters. For about an hour I only had the vaguest clue what the film was even about. When you get to the climax it’s much ado about less than nothing. It’s one of the most underwhelming conclusions to a film I’ve seen in a long time and surely won’t please anyone. If you can tell me what the fuck it was all about, drop me a line. But hey, in a cute twist Elliot’s the one who plays dead this time, so I guess there’s that.

For me the most interesting thing (aside from learning that co-star Katy Manning once got her tits out with a Dalek in the 70s) was watching it on a cable channel in Australia devoted to Indigenous Australian content, when the film is probably pretty offensive to the original owners of this land. It’s all very clichéd and the word ‘Abo’ is used here. Even as someone who lived through the 80s and 90s I’m still surprised that the term was so casually thrown around in a film like this.

Perhaps a mild curiosity due to its star, location, and the BMX bikes, but this is a pretty tedious flick and Henry Thomas is thoroughly unpersuasive in the lead. Good-looking but zero reason to watch it outside of that mild curiosity.

Rating: D+