2 out of 5

Directed by: Anthony Cousins

This fairly bog-standard found footage film is more watchable than my rating suggests, but it also operates almost 100% on vibes, to the extent that its rather clever turnabout in expectations is essentially undermined, which is repeated in miniature with an epilogue that reframes the movie… then a midcredits addendum that undermines that reframing.

Frogman cannot be mentioned in the same breath without Blair Witch. Not just because of its shared found footage genre, but also because its track-the-local-myth-through-the-woods shaky cam is clearly modeled after that film’s finely walked line of “what did I just see?” horror, visually mixed in with Paranormal Activity‘s night vision and The Descent’s claustrophobia. With some modern day cynicism sprinkled on top, the movie gets off to a clunky but charming start: failed filmmaker Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) is intent on spending his last chance / last dollars on a documentary of “Frogman,” a local cryptid – based on the Loveland Frog – that has haunted Dallas since his youth, after an affecting but always doubted sighting. He ropes in his crush / friend, Amy (Chelsey Grant) before she can move out to LA on an acting pursuit, and camerman and friend Scotty (Benny Barrett), a wingman type who equally acts as Dallas’ conscience and co-dependent.

With tongue in cheek, director and co-writer Anthony Cousins jumps between a handheld cam and cellphones for a “film everything” justification for this eventual documentary, with Scotty conveniently leaving the camera running during intimate conversations and so on, attempting to fill in backstory on our characters as they travel to Frogman’s hometown.

Upon arrival, Dallas’ last chance becomes more and more of an obsession, with every “let’s just film this one last thing” giving him further justification to dive into the Frogman legend and keep going with it. And because it’s found footage – eventually to ruin.

So… what’s wrong with any of this? I called it bog-standard; and that standardness is, for better or worse, part of a lot found footage, so what makes this any worse than that? The hints are kind of there from the start: Dallas is apparently only one of two people to have ever nabbed a picture of Frogman, making him the ridicule of online trolls who review cryptid history for legitimacy. But it’s only really one troll, and one pretty tame video response sends Dallas to do a POV video telling us about how he’s gonna prove this Frogman thing for real. We viewers are filling in our assumptions of this being a lifelong obsession, just based on the tone / vibes of this scene. Extend that to nearly everything that follows: Cousins essentially gets that we know this dance from the legions of movies like it, but instead of leaning into that for sharper satire – something that would make later tonal shifts hit harder – it makes the movie and characters come across as a summary of an idea. You’re always waiting for it to figure itself out: for the joke of the setup to land; or – as it later does – to pivot to real horror, except Cousins dispenses with too many interesting asides on his way to this pivot that by the time we get there, that’s pretty surface level as well. Plus: I don’t care that your budget is low: “supernatural” forces or whatever causing the video to glitch out at convenient times has never been a good trick. Never. Ever. Not even the first time it was done. And Frogman is egregious with that, making a bid to match Blair Witch’s shaky cam extremes.

And there was some budget, because when the monster gets some time on screen, man, it looks good. Cousins has some great visual frames in mind that he (and his effects team / crew) execute pretty perfectly.

Overall, the twist of a funny concept into a “real” horror is a solid approach, and from the top down, Frogman does it well. But in the weeds of the actual script and characters, it’s rather uninvolving, which makes it harder to appreciate some of its select smart moments and the quality effects work. Then, as mentioned up top, when a final coda makes me start reevaluating what I’ve watched… Cousins loses his grit and falls back on some cheap stuff for a mid-credits scene.