Many movies ripped off Mad Max, but few of the cash-ins were anywhere near as inventive as the truly surreal Hell Comes To Frogtown. Released in 1979, Mad Max was an almost unprecedented success for star Mel Gibson and co-writer/director George Miller. Costing almost nothing to produce, the sparse and brutal Australian exploitation movie made millions at the global box office.
Soon, Mad Max received a sequel in the form of 1981’s The Road Warrior, a more ambitious (although still low-budget) action movie that featured far more world-building and lore than its predecessor. The original Mad Max was only set in the future to save on production costs, as Miller could not afford crowded locations filled with extras and expensive shooting permits, so, therefore, co-authored a story set in an under-populated, desolate setting. However, The Road Warrior took this premise and ran with it, crafting an entire fictional society defined by tribal struggles to allocate precious resources like oil and water after the apocalypse.
Like Star Wars and Alien before it, the Mad Max series was exactly the sort of visionary franchise that inevitably spawned countless imitators of varying quality. However, the Mad Max films were always a little odd and offbeat, making the movies that ripped them off particularly wild. Ripping off a more mainstream blockbuster like Top Gun did not necessarily produce bizarre movies, but attempting to outdo characters like Lord Humunugus gave rise to truly strange outings such as 1988’s Hell Comes To Frogtown. Best remembered for his storied wrestling career and surprisingly solid lead performance in John Carpenter’s They Live, Rowdy Roddy Piper starred in this cult hit that ripped off the Mad Max movies but took the material in a far stranger and even more outrageous direction. That said, the curio did also—against all odds—manage to featured a plot similar to that of 2015's Fury Road, albeit with more nudity and mutated frog people.
Mad Max’s Success Made Rip-offs Inevitable
Not only was the 1979 Mad Max the most profitable movie ever made at the time, but The Road Warrior introduced a dusty dystopian aesthetic that proved so influential it is still the go-to style for filmmakers shooting a post-apocalyptic action movie. As a result, Hell Comes To Frogtown was only one of many movies that attempted to recreate Mad Max’s appeal, but its unhinged premise meant it was easily the most audacious of these cash grabs. Piper plays a character who, like Max, stumbles into an endangered community and helps them out despite being a rootless wanderer—but his reasons for doing so and the threat they face is not like anything from Max’s adventures.
Hell Comes To Frogtown’s Wild Story
Hell Comes To Frogtown follows Piper’s nomadic drifter who, just like the immortal Mad Max, becomes embroiled in a political struggle as he passes through a desolate wasteland. Unlike Max, Piper’s Sam Hell is stuck negotiating a truce between warrior nurses and the mutated frogmen who have kidnapped many of them. It’s a plot not entirely unlike Fury Road, save for the fact the villains are six-foot-tall amphibians and the only reason Hell is willing to work with these nurses is that they affix a device to his genitals that acts as a shock collar if he attempts to escape.
While Hell does attempt to escape numerous times regardless, this device means he is mostly at the mercy of the warrior nurses and is forced to help them recover their kidnapped colleagues. Lest it seems like the movie is taking itself too seriously, Piper’s Furiosa-esque love interest informs him that he was sought out by her tribe to help repopulate the group and they followed a trail of pregnant women to track him across the wasteland. So begins a surreal adventure wherein Piper and his captor fall for each other, save the captives, and eventually live (in this movie’s surreal setting, at least) happily ever after.
Hell Comes To Frogtown’s Surprising Mad Max Connection
Despite the evident silliness of the story, 1988's Hell Comes To Frogtown shares a surprising amount of thematic resonance with Mad Max: Fury Road. For one thing, the women warriors are depicted as comparatively heroic where the mutated misogynistic villains view them only as breeding stock, an idea revisited far more seriously in Fury Road’s Immortan Joe and the War Boys, who keep their leader’s harem of “wives” as sex slaves. For another, the primary villain turns out to be a corrupt military general trying to maximize his power and influence by arming the villains in exchange for their loyalty, which Fury Road fans will recall is Immortan Joe’s canon backstory depicted in the comics.
There are important differences—Hell Comes To Frogtown’s villainous Count Sodom is not revealed to be the duplicitous Captain Devlin until a late twist, whereas Immortan Joe never conceals his origins. However, even this revelation is not unlike a twist that was cut from the early drafts of The Road Warrior. That sequel’s villainous Lord Humungus was originally revealed to be the previous movie’s heroic police officer Goose, driven to become evil after being brutally burned by a biker gang and left for dead.
Hell Comes To Frogtown’s Legacy
Although largely forgotten (understandably, as the movie is a low-budget, action-horror-sci-fi-comedy), Hell Comes To Frogtown did earn not one, but two belated, even lower budget sequels and inspired an episode of Family Guy’s title in “Hell Comes To Quahog.' Despite its obscure status, the bizarre flick remains fondly remembered by many fans of Piper’s as one of his better B-movie efforts, and a truly original outing that has more to offer than most Mad Max knock-offs of the time. Only time will tell whether Furiosa’s upcoming spin-off also borrows from the Hell Comes To Frogtown mythos when constructing its post-apocalyptic milieu. However, whether unintentional or not, the Roddy Piper movie can at least proudly say that thanks to Fury Road, it influenced the Mad Max movies much like they influenced Hell Comes To Frogtown.