Frozen Scream

A pretty lame horror flick about a scientist's attempts to make people immortal. Unfortunately, his immortality process destroys the victim's soul and personality. This is a bad movie, featuring several funny parts. I particularly liked the scene of two women in the hospital talking, when out of nowhere the policeman narrator's voice is dubbed over the conversation. It's just sloppily put together.

Beyond that, the only point of interest is that H. Kingsley Thurber did the music. He also provided the exact same music for Don't Go In the Woods. I'd say over half of Frozen Scream's music appeared in Woods, also. For fans of DGITW this is certainly of historical importance, but ultimately Frozen Scream is not worth your time.

*dec. 2004. I watched it again. I now value Frozen Scream. Some stretches of boredom, but more amusement than I had originally thought. Don't go too far out of your way to see it, but bad movie fans should find something of interest here.

All I knew when I bought this was that there was a screaming woman in bikini and 80s hair on the cover - good enough for me! Little did I know that I was in for one of the most enriching bad-movie experiences of my life. Very few crap masterpieces achieve this pitch of manic hilarity: disastrously chaotic, sludgy, tawdry and completely unpredictable. Two different living rooms in two different provinces have been filled with friends gasping for air as they watched. It picks up steam as it goes along too, adding element upon useless, mind-boggling element. Of course the best one is that fricking detective, his jocular voice-over dropping on top of ongoing pointless dialogue scenes like an anvil; you never know when he's going to start spouting off and that adds suspense. The conniving head nurse with the charisma deficit has an accent so impenetrable you wonder why she wasn't dubbed, especially when the tall, Nordic-looking old mad scientist shows up, because he WAS dubbed - his voice is unmistakably that of a very articulate African-American man! Throw in those wasteoids chanting "Love and immortality" on the beach, gore effects courtesy of Heinz, and the un-oiled flywheel of a soundtrack, all coming at you non-stop one after the other. Jaw-droppingly bad.

It's hard to believe this was made in 1975 or on the planet earth. It seems much older than that and alien on most levels. Whenever a scene seems pointless, rather than cut it down they instead have a detective character speak over the already speaking actors. It's something of a struggle to know who to listen to and the detective sounds like the famous voice over from THE CREEPING TERROR--a famously bad film that this film gives a run for it's money. There is other redubbing going on from time to time in a way that it seems several different actors redudded lines even within one scene playing for the same character.

Brief brief nudity and powerful low budget bad idea badness give this film more bad movie energy than either THE CREEPING TERROR or PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE. It does come a good ten years too late to be considered as much of a must see as those films since by the mid 70's bad films existed in such numbers it became more fashionable to love them than hate them.

But this deserves attention, directing, music, acting, etc etc all areas defy common logic and supersede lack of talent in a way that is, well, talented.

Rarely has a bad film been so much fun to me of late. There's an odd sort of dream scene--always another plus--and one vaguely thought inducing monologue about how science always tamper with nature even in curing disease.

To add to the greatness is of course the generally terrible nature of the copies to watch, giving it that late night broken telecine projector feel that will make bad movie fans swell with nostalgia or excitement. Oh yeah there's also a drunken priest character in one scene, the fun rarely stops in this one.

Frozen Scream (1975)

* (out of 4)

Insane horror film about a mad scientist who wants to make people immortal but instead his frozen experiments turn them into lifeless zombies. Soon the zombies are out killing people.

My brief plot description is actually a lot more plot than is actually in the film. I'm really not lying because FROZEN SCREAM makes very little sense thanks in large part to some pretty awful dubbed dialogue and even the voice-over narration makes no sense. You know you're in trouble when the narration, which is meant to explain things, just makes you all the more confused. There's no doubt that FROZEN SCREAM is an awful movie but thankfully it's bad enough to where bad movie lovers will get a few bits of entertainment from it.

Everything in this movie is pretty bad from the direction to the cinematography and pretty much everything else. It was obvious that the filmmakers were working with very little money and I'd also add that they didn't appear to have too much knowledge on how to make a movie. As I said, the film makes no sense story-wise and it's hard to tell what any of the characters are doing or what their motivations are.

The film also benefits from the weak performances, although it's hard to fully judge them due to the really bad dubbing. The film has a couple memorable kill scenes. Not because they're great or well-staged but because of how poor they are. Again, if you hate bad movies then it's best that you stay away from this one. If you're enjoy these type of low-budget drive-in films then you'll probably get a few laughs from this one.

After opening narration with keen insight into the mysteries of life like I've listed up above, mad Dr. Sven Johnson (Lee James) and his evil assistant Lil Stanhope (Renee Harmon) are shown trying to reverse the aging process by experimenting on tied-up captives. They send out ridiculous-looking, hooded, laughing, bug-eyed henchmen with scythes to gather victims. Jumbled nightmare/flashbacks featuring wrist slashing, blood-drinking, a topless blonde and zombified teens chanting "love and immortality!" around a campfire will make you think you're losing your mind. Meanwhile, a band at a pool party sings "Jack Around the Shack" (?!) to the tune of Rock Around the Clock!

Nothing in this very bad (but rare) movie makes a lick of sense, the droning narration goes on and on (if fact it often goes right over some of the dialogue!) and the entire monotone cast acts brain dead. Harmon, who co-wrote the original story and produced, proves she is just as awful behind the scenes as she is on screen. Continental Video released FROZEN SCREAM on a double tape with the equally awful EXECUTIONER, PART II (which was also written by and starring Miss Harmon).

I dare you to suffer through TWO of her films in the one night!