Trog

• This was Joan Crawford's final film role — she died in 1977, seven years after Trog came out.
• Director Freddie Francis, an Oscar-winning cinematographer (Sons and Lovers, 1960), later called Trog "a terrible film" and said he only took the job out of loyalty to Crawford — the crew needed idiot cards all over the set because she couldn't remember her lines.
• Trog's caveman costume wasn't custom-built for the film — per TCM, it was a "leftover monkey outfit" recycled from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
• The project started life at Tony Tenser's Tigon Films, based on a story by Peter Bryan and John Gilling, before Tenser sold it to producer Herman Cohen, who set it up at Warner Bros. — it was never an Amicus production, contrary to how it's sometimes misremembered.
• Roger Ebert's original 1970 review mocked the film's most infamous image: Crawford, "in an immaculate beige pantsuit," wandering the cave shouting "Trog! Here, Trog!" — he called the whole thing absurd.

Trog represents the repressed violence of the civilized world; the townspeople project their own savagery onto the beast while ignoring their own mob mentality and greed.

The cave finale isn't really about Trog — it's about Brockton's failure. She spends the whole film arguing that science and empathy can win out over fear, and the ending (soldiers storming in with explosives and rifles over her objections) is the film admitting that argument loses. Trog's death isn't a mercy killing; it's proof the "civilized" world would rather destroy what it doesn't understand than sit with the discomfort of understanding it.

The film functions as an allegory for the death of Old Hollywood, with Crawford's disengaged, cue-card-dependent performance mirroring the industry's abandonment of its aging stars in favor of cheap exploitation.

Dr. Brockton, a respected anthropologist, is called in when a real, living troglodyte — a half-man, half-ape survivor from the Ice Age — is found alive in a village cave system. She tries to civilize him: teaching him words and colors, even performing surgery so he can speak. But when a scheming local property developer breaks into her lab, trashes it, and turns Trog loose to sabotage her work, the creature snaps — killing the man who wronged him and tearing through the village. Cornered back in his own cave after a flash of mercy (he hands over a kidnapped little girl unharmed), Trog isn't met with reason. Soldiers storm the cave with explosives and rifles over Brockton's objections, gun him down, and leave him impaled on a stalagmite. It plays less like a monster movie and more like a mean little tragedy — the "beast" shows more humanity than the frightened, greedy townsfolk who hunted him down.