Boiling Rage

I live about thirty minutes drive away from Derbyshire and, when I get chance, I like to visit the county's amazing show caves. I must have been twenty times over the years and on every single occasion I've thought of 'Trog'.

'Trog' is a fantastically entertaining film. When the missing link is discovered in a cave, anthropologist Dr. Beckton (Joan Crawford, in her last role) trains it to play with dolls, balls and, eventually, with the aid of an operation, to form simple words. Trog is at heart a beast, however, and every little thing that bothers him ends up smashed, chucked or dead. When he escapes (with the aid of shit stirring Christian nut job Michael Gough) it can only end one way: he's going out like Konga, in a hail of army bullets.

I unashamedly love this film. There are too many high points to provide a definitive list, but the long sodium pentathol sequence, where a whacked out Trog has a dubious flashback in which he watches dinosaurs fight, become extinct and the coming of the Ice Age (events a mere sixty odd million years apart) truly has to be seen to be believed.

Director? Freddie Francis: the patron saint of this weblog.