Frog Dreaming: Or, How I Was Haunted by a Kids Film from the 1980s

Let me tell you a story. It’s one of loss and rediscovery, and the 30 years of frustration that came in between. It involves a videotape and the boy from E.T. and Quentin Tarantino and a 1970s Doctor Who companion and IMDB and Twitter. And it all centres on a children’s film that deserves to be more famous than it is.

In the late 1980s, when I was about nine or 10 years old, I had a day off school with a cold. My mother had to go to work, so she said I could stay at home alone. I was under orders not to answer the door or damage anything – I should just play on my Commodore 64 or watch TV. I don’t remember what I did during the morning, but I do recall my mum popping home at lunchtime. She asked how I was, made my lunch, and gave me some treats for the afternoon: a can of Coke, a bag of Quavers, and a VHS tape she’d rented.

I was a video-rental addict in those days and have very fond memories of our nearby video shop, County Road Video in Ormskirk, Lancashire. Even now, I can remember its exact layout. I can picture where the counter was, where the new releases were displayed, and which sections had the older tapes. I can remember the posters in the window and the bargain bin of cheapo action movies (which always seemed to contain the 1985 flick America Ninja, which to this day I’ve still never seen). I have a rush of Proustian recollection when I think about the shape and feel and smell of the VHS boxes. To a kid who loved films it was a really magical place, and I was allowed to rent one tape per week. I had a choice of hundreds: the 1980s was a golden era for video releases. So even if most weeks I picked the same titles over and over again – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Karate Kid – I ended up seeing a lot of films and many of them are still very precious to me now.

However, the VHS tape my mother had selected for me that day was not a big, famous movie. It didn’t have Steven Spielberg or George Lucas’s name in the credits. It wasn’t a sequel. I hadn’t seen its box on the video-shop shelves or its poster in the window. I’d never heard of it. With time to kill before Children’s BBC began at about 4pm, however, I gave it a go…

For the next 30 years, I remembered two things from that solitary afternoon viewing. Firstly, I knew that I’d enjoyed the film. I had a warm memory of it being fun and exciting. Secondly, and crucially, there was a specific scene that stuck firmly in the deep recesses of my consciousness. However, other than that… I forgot everything else.

As the years went by, I forgot what it had been called. I forgot who’d been in it. I even forgot which country it had been from – America probably, but maybe it was British? I forgot whether it had been new when I saw it or whether it had been made before I was born. I was fairly certain it had been in colour, but almost everything else just faded away.

For three decades, every now and again, that specific scene would float into my head for one reason or another. It featured a young character – a girl, I thought – whose friend had drowned in a local lake. She was despondent, of course, but she now had a revelatory idea. Looking into a fish tank, she paid close attention to a mechanical toy truck at the bottom of the water. This miniature dumpster, part of a model flooded village or something, was raising and lowering its bucket. The girl realised that as it went up and down it was creating an air bubble. Perhaps, somehow, maybe, her friend was still alive at the bottom of the lake, trapped in a pocket of air…

I’d remember this moment and be angry with myself that I couldn’t recall what the film was. I wanted to see it again, but more importantly I wanted to vanquish the ghost. It drove me *crazy* not knowing, not being able to place it. I asked people if they knew where the scene was from. When the internet came along, I tried chat rooms and message boards and social media. I Googled and searched. But I was always unsuccessful, so much so that I began to question whether I’d made the scene up. Perhaps I’d got the context completely wrong. Memories play tricks, of course.

Then, in January 2019, success at last…

I was having one of my periodic attempts at tracking the film down. It had now been around 30 years since that solitary viewing, but while idling around on IMDB I realised that the website allows you to search films by subject matter. I typed ‘trapped underwater’ into the box…

And there it was – result number 27. A movie called The Quest.

It was a laser-bolt-to-the-brain epiphany. I soon found an online synopsis, which convinced me it was the right film. I also learnt that it had been released in 1986 (the date in the IMDB image above is a mistake) so had been just two or three years old when I saw it. And it had been set, as well as filmed, in Australia. However, one thing jarred. I didn’t recognise the title. ‘The Quest’ was so vague that it didn’t mean anything to me. A bit of research soon revealed that this is a film with *numerous* names.

The original title when released in Australia in May 1986 was Frog Dreaming, a reference to an Aboriginal myth mentioned in the story. However, that was deemed unsuitable for North America where it was retitled The Quest – hence the IMDB listing. And that was only the beginning of the multiple nomenclatures… In Argentina, it was known as The Mystery of the Lagoon; in Brazil, Quite an Adventure; in Bulgaria, The Boy Who Chases Ghosts; in Finland, The Battle of Spirits; in France and Spain, The Secret of the Lake; in Italy, The Mystery of the Dark Lake; in Japan, Legendary Adventure; in the Soviet Union, Spring Breakers; in Sweden, The Spirit Chaser; in West Germany, The Ghost Hunter; and in the UK, The Go-Kids.

The Go-Kids! *That* had been the name when I saw it! Memories now started to seep back, even more so when I looked up the extraordinary cover for the UK video release. Artwork for VHS cassettes in the 1980s was often a combination of gorgeous aesthetics and bat-shit-crazy excess, and The Go-Kids was no exception.

The film had been issued with a PG certificate by the British Board of Film Classification on 1 December 1986, then the marketing boys had clearly attempted to cash-in on the success of some recent rivals. The British title was pretty obviously chosen to remind people of the hit 1985 kids film The Goonies. The VHS artwork also owed a debt to the dramatic posters for fantasy flicks like Conan the Barbarian – the heroic poses, the male character placed centrally with females crouching down, the dramatic landscape. But The Go-Kids adds a helicopter, a huge skeleton, and a looming wraith bathed in demonic light. For extra measure, the lead character also seems to be holding a Star Wars lightsaber. (Spoiler: it’s actually a torch.)

As I gazed lovingly at the image, I saw that the lead character had been played by Henry Thomas, the star of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestial (1982). This provided me with a nice connection: E.T. was the first film I ever saw at the cinema, when aged three years old. But I hadn’t remembered that Thomas had also been in this. There was still so much I didn’t know. However, now I’d discovered the multiple names I had a way of actually seeing it for the first since about 1988.

My first step was to look up its trailer on YouTube…

Very quickly, more memories were returning – especially from the scene showing Henry Thomas’s character riding a bicycle on a train track. I recalled now that I’d loved the film’s Heath Robinson element – that sense of a young character being resourceful and bodging contraptions together. But as well as a nice injection of nostalgia, I was struck by just how *good* the trailer is. It shows off some gorgeous cinematography and macabre imagery, and sets up a spooky, exciting story without giving too much away. My resolve to see the film again quadrupled.

So I went online and found a DVD copy for sale. The film was (and still is) available to view on streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video, but I’m a fan of physical media and also found an Australian release that came with some special features. Being Australian, it used the original title of Frog Dreaming – which is what I shall do from now on. I clicked ‘Buy now’ and after a few days the disc arrived….

It was a very special experience, seeing the film for the second time – three decades after the first. I was nervous. What if it turned out to be awful? Surely we’ve all had experiences of returning to a cherished film or TV show from childhood and realising it wasn’t as great as we’d remembered.

Thankfully, I loved it.

As its publicity images suggest, Frog Dreaming is very much in the mould of The Goonies, E.T., Flight of the Navigator, Labyrinth and D.A.R.Y.L. – all those American movies from the 1980s about inquisitive and adventurous children. It’s an adventure film, a coming-of-age story, a detective plot. Perhaps most surprisingly it’s also part of a tradition that flourished back then but doesn’t seem to exist any more: kids films that are actively *terrifying*.

Some sequences of Frog Dreaming feel like they’ve straight out of a horror movie. The opening scene, for example, is filmed with slow, graceful shots of an empty rural landscape. Straightaway we feel menace and sense that there’s danger hidden in the undergrowth or below the waters of a remote lake. As bubbles rise to the surface of the lake, a rickety wind turbine begins to clink round and round as if coming alive (a visual and aural detail that now makes me think of the opening of Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon a Time in the West – not a connection I would have made in 1988!). The music, by Brian ‘not that one’ May, is eerie and foreboding. Something scary is happening, but we’re not quite sure what. Is there a monster in the lake?

The hero of the film is Henry Thomas’s Cody, a 14-year-old American orphan who is now living in Australia with his father’s best friend. Character introductions are always vital in films, and we first see Cody in a workshop soldering a gadget onto his push-bike. He then hooks the bike up to a train track and attempts a speed record – it’s the scene featured prominently in the trailer. The whole town cheers him on. We sense straightaway that this kid is special, smart, adventurous. (And the use of a BMX bike is, of course, another reminder of E.T.)

Later, Cody and his two friends go for a bike ride into the bush, into an area known by the local Aboriginal community as ‘frog-dreaming land’ – a place of spiritual importance. The kids soon stumble across the lake we saw in the opening, where they find a dead body and come to suspect that the water is hiding an enormous monster akin to the one in Loch Ness. Cody then learns about an Aboriginal myth relating to the lake, which tells of a rock-eating creature called a Donkagin, and he feels the need to investigate… (A quick word on the film’s racial politics. To modern ears, the script plays fast and loose with racially naive language – ‘blacks’, ‘black fellas’ and ‘Abos’ are all used casually – though in its favour the story is not disrespectful of native beliefs, and the Aboriginal characters are all given personalities and senses of humour.)

What’s most impressive about Frog Dreaming is its ability to view the world through its characters’ eyes. Unlike the prosaic adult characters, Cody can see possibilities and imaginatively turn the mundane into the magical – a common thread in 80s movies about adventurous children. The film shares this sense of wonder, imbuing Cody’s small-town world with danger and excitement. It’s really well-paced too: a tight 93 minutes with no fat or slackening of momentum. And there are many impressive sequences, such as the prologue I mentioned earlier and another creepy scene that sees Cody encounter a mysterious wise man called Charlie Pride. To get to Charlie, who he hopes can provide answers about Donkagin, Cody travels upriver a la Apocalypse Now and then meets Charlie on a spooky pier at night. Smoke, backlighting and fine cinematography create a tense moment that could be straight out of a Spielberg movie.

As for the all-important scene with the fish tank that had – for unknown reasons – lodged so doggedly in my brain for three decades, I was rather moved when it came around. I’d recalled it fairly accurately. A couple of details were off the mark (there’s no flooded model village, for example) but I was cheered that I hadn’t got it completely wrong. It was actually a surreal experience watching it again after so long. Almost like reliving a dream.

As I watched the film, I spotted some other familiar faces in the cast aside from Henry Thomas. Cody’s best pal – and the object of his unspoken affections – is a local girl called Wendy, played by Rachel Friend. Friend went on to be in the soap opera Neighbours during an era when I was watching it, appearing as a character called Bronwyn Davies. Wendy’s sister, meanwhile, is played by Tamsin West who later starred in the terrific Australian kids show Round the Twist, which was very popular in the UK when I was a child. She also sang its memorable theme tune.

But the biggest surprise came when Wendy and Jane’s mother made an appearance. Having spent so long searching for this film, it had never occurred to me that its cast might include someone I’d met. But I now saw that Mrs Cannon was played by the adorable force of nature that is Katy Manning. After several TV roles in Britain, including starring in Doctor Who from 1971 until 1973 (pictured below), Manning had moved to Australia in the early 1980s so her children could live in sunnier climes. Not intending to stay long, she was there nearly 30 years. She began a long-term relationship with the actor and singer Barry Crocker, gained Australian citizenship in 2004, and has since returned to the UK full time.

I’d met Katy soon after I moved to London in 2002. I was working for a production company that specialises in Doctor Who audio dramas and Katy played a recurring character called Iris Wildthyme. We’ve also met at parties over the years and to this day we share several mutual friends. She’s a sunbeam of positive energy and very popular on the Doctor Who convention circuit where she and Jo Grant, the character she played in the 1970s, are rightly cherished. I had no idea of her involvement in this film that had dogged my memories since the 1980s, and have not seen her since I rediscovered it, but it’s another lovely connection.

Having enjoyed my second-ever viewing of Frog Dreaming, I next tried to find out what I could about the film’s production. The script was written by Everett De Roche, who died in 2014. He had an extensive career in Australian film and TV, taking in horror movies such as Patrick (1978) and the Jamie Lee Curtis-starring Roadgames (1981). He also has a Doctor Who link: he wrote an episode of the 2010 spin-off series K-9. Inspiration for Frog Dreaming’s monster-in-the-lake plot came when De Roche stumbled across some old photographs of an empty quarry with a train track winding to the bottom. He’d tried to pitch his idea as a TV script in the 1970s, but it didn’t find a home until he was able to sell it as a movie 10 years later.

The film was shot in the Australian state of Victoria – mostly in the rural towns of Woods Point and Menzies Creek. The all-important location of the lake, however, was Moorooduc Quarry Flora and Fauna Reserve just south of Melbourne. Rather than a distant, isolated place far from civilisation, the reserve is actually surrounded by urban housing. Local legend had long claimed that the pool of water in its abandoned quarry was bottomless, but the police did some bathymetry work before filming and discovered it was only 40 feet at its deepest point.

Henry Thomas – just 14 years old at the time, with his voice breaking – was popular on set, especially because of his willingness to get stuck in. He even knocked himself out while filming the train-track bike ride. Attracted to the idea of filming in Australia, Thomas initially planned to play his role with an Australian accent – an idea then dropped – and also did some research into the local Aboriginal community. But soon after starting work, the actor had doubts about the director. He wasn’t the only one.

Russell Hagg had worked on Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange as an art director and had then written an early draft of BMX Bandits, a 1983 comedy-drama starring a young Nicole Kidman. But his early work as a director on Frog Dreaming did not go down well. Investors were frustrated by the slow progress and unimpressive rushes. It seems Hagg had interpreted the script as a warm, safe family film, rather than the dark adventure story De Roche had written. Thomas was also unhappy because Hagg was reluctant to listen to his suggestions. So the money men insisted the director be changed. De Roche was asked to take over himself but he balked at the idea and instead helped to find a replacement.

Brian Trenchard-Smith had just finished working on an episode of a TV drama called Five Mile Creek, which had introduced a new regular character played by Nicole Kidman. He’d known the actress since directing her in her first film – BMX Bandits. So when De Roche and his producer Barbi Taylor asked to see Trenchard-Smith as soon as possible, he was having dinner with Kidman in a restaurant. Shuffling across to another table, he listened as De Roche and Taylor asked him to take over their troubled movie. They specifically wanted him to form a bond with the unhappy star, Henry Thomas. Trenchard-Smith agreed straightaway and started work within 24 hours, essentially junking the first fortnight’s work and starting again. One of the first things he did was screen BMX Bandits for Thomas to show him the sensibility he thought they needed – fun, daring, edgy, and most importantly full of wonder.

I already knew of Trenchard-Smith’s work, in part because he’s been championed by my favourite film director, Quentin Tarantino. I’d seen the pair being interviewed together for a terrific documentary about Australian exploitation cinema, Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! (2008), with QT gleefully telling Trenchard-Smith how much he loved his films in the 70s and 80s. In the same chat, Tarantino mentions that he wants to see Frog Dreaming (or The Quest, as he calls it). He has a copy, he says, but hasn’t had a chance to run it yet.

Originally from Britain, Trenchard-Smith was an established director when the Frog Dreaming gig came up. He had been working in Australia for 20 years or more, gaining notoriety for low-budget movies such as the George Lazenby crime film The Man from Hong Kong (1975) and the ultra-violent satire Turkey Shoot (1982). Frog Dreaming was actually one of three films he released in 1986: there was also the stylish post-apocalyptic action film Dead End Drive-In and the sentimental domestic drama Jenny Kissed Me (co-starring Frog Dreaming’s Tamsin West). Drawn to the Frog Dreaming project by both the script and a chance to work with E.T.’s Henry Thomas, Trenchard-Smith quickly had a positive influence on set. De Roche once said that the whole production instantly became sunnier, and that sense of drive and purpose and energy is evident in the finished film. Trenchard-Smith does a wonderful job with the material.

Soon after I’d seen Frog Dreaming again, I began following Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Twitter account. One day, on a whim, I sent him a private message to say how much I’d enjoyed rediscovering his 1986 classic. I wasn’t expecting a reply, but on 13 February 2019 he wrote back: ‘Thanks so much for your appreciation of Frog Dreaming/The Go Kids/The Quest/The Spirit Chaser/etc,’ he said. ‘At the time, I knew I had made something special for the young, who would one day become parents and show it to their kids and grandkids and so on.’

Quite right too. Assuming they could remember what it was called, of course.

Ten railway bikes and gyrocopters out of 10

NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The Quavers image is used by permission of Jason Liebig at Collecting Candy.

Thanks to the members of the Ormskirk Community Group on Facebook for helping me research the name of my childhood video shop.

The BBFC information can be found here.

This enjoyable YouTube video explores the film’s locations.

Our mutual friend Mark Wright helped with information about Katy Manning.

Thanks to Brian Trenchard-Smith (@GENERALMURRAY) for permission to quote from our Twitter chat.