The Frozen Dead

this movie was so bizarre. i can barely remember it, in only half-envisioned scenes that flit through my memory.... but i long for it, to possess it, to own it..... and where is it, in this day of videos and DVDs and TCM? i loved the frozen dead! i love it still! let me revisit this twisted, simple and torturous, evil story! who needs especially good special effects when one can be completely creeped out by a classic presentation like this??? come back to me, O scary movie seen once upon a time on television.....ah, the 70s.

might i add that other creepy favorites of mine which also i'd long sought are now available on DVD: most specifically "Asylum", that don amicus flick... delightful!

I just read the other user comment saying this film was not easily forgotten and I felt compelled to comment. I too saw this movie when I was young.. about ten years old... and here I am thirty years later and I suddenly felt compelled to Google it out of the blue. It really did haunt me and obviously still crosses my mind from time to time. I would not watch it again, either - there was something very sickening about it. I guess if I watched it now, used to the modern age of special effects and film techniques I would not be terribly impressed... but at the time it left it's mark. For that I give it positive rating even though I wish I'd never seen it in the first place.

The creator of IT! (1966) also made this preposterous but slightly more enjoyable precursor to the "Nazi Zombie" sub-genre earlier that same year and, funnily enough, I came across both these hitherto rare movies almost simultaneously from different sources…which is why I ended up watching them back-to-back. Actually, THE FROZEN DEAD had previously been available on a low budget DVD double-feature with the similar (but clearly crazier) THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN (1963) that soon went out-of-print – so I am certainly glad to have stumbled upon the former via alternative channels that, curiously (since I have no recollection of it ever being shown on Italian TV in the past 25 years), sports a second audio track in Italian (which, ironically, is much cleaner than the garbled original)!! Anyway, THE FROZEN DEAD stars waning Hollywood star Dana Andrews (sporting an inadvertently amusing German accent that, together with his silent 'r' pronounciation, makes him sound as if he is slurring his lines…and, being aware of his past battles with alcohol, I wonder!) as a former Nazi scientist who has, since the end of WWII, relocated to a large estate in the English countryside to conduct revivification experiments on 12 cryogenically frozen top Nazi officials (including his own brother Edward Fox)! In fact, the latter's anguished cries open the film as 8 of these subjects are shown to have failed in regaining their normal mental capacities and, consequently, are treated much like unwanted pets, taken out for their daily stroll by Andrews' whip-wielding assistant Karl (Alan Tilvern). Karl's own zeal and blind faith in the Party has made him (unwisely, as it turns out) invite his impatient superiors to witness Andrews' non-existent breakthrough with his first 'success': a hulking, bald manservant named Joseph. To complicate matters further, 3 innocent bystanders (Andrews' niece, her ill-fated best friend, and Andrews' younger colleague) soon take up residence in Andrews' mansion, obviously unaware of the sinister goings-on beneath in his secret laboratory or his past political affiliations. Ever eager-to-please, Karl impulsively injects the visiting friend with a mortal substance – and has Fox strangle her for good measure! – so as to provide the disillusioned Andrews with a live brain specimen for him to study (in an attempt not to muck up any more of the remaining frozen dead)! A complex charade – that also involves Karl's facially-scarred secret female relative who lives nearby – is set in motion to appease Andrews' niece from worrying for (or delving deeper into) her friend's sudden disappearance…but this does not stop the niece from finding out about the former within hours! The young scientist – who, naturally, has fallen for the niece on first sight – is in on the friend's murder (since he was brought here specifically to help Andrews successfully complete his experiments) but only decides to do something about it following a couple of failed murder attempts (courtesy of the increasingly demented Karl) on the niece's person! Ever the dedicated sadists, the 2 Nazi superiors (who seemingly appear and disappear at the mansion at random) torture Karl for his clumsiness and force Andrews to throw him in with the frozen dead for the ultimate punishment! The last (and most outlandish) pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to be found in this lurid shocker are 'the living head' – belonging to the niece's friend, of course, within which resides the all-important live brain…although Andrews is never shown doing much with it – apparently dreading her scowling countenance! – and the remarkably Cocteauesque wall of severed arms – whose real use is never fully explained (unless some of the frozen dead had been maimed or something) but their potential is certainly not wasted when, in the film's climax, the head telepathically (don't ask) fatally wraps them around the necks of Andrews and the older of the Nazi superiors (Karel Stepanek)! The very last shot of the film, then, has the head pleading with the surviving niece and her doctor companion to give it that much-denied burial! 2 final things: director Leder must have seen the works of horror maestro Tod Browning one time too many because, both here and and IT!, he displays the latter's frustrating knack of cutting away at the most inopportune moments and having much of the key action take place offscreen!; besides, while the version I acquired came from an open-matte color print (making the boom mike clearly visible a couple of times!), the film was apparently originally released to theaters in black-and-white…which, I suppose, must have robbed the living head of her creepy bluish pallor!

I saw this movie when I was perhaps 6 or 7 and have only seen bits of it on TV since, but I remember it all too well. A Nazi physician is trying to revive frozen high-ranking Germans, but they all come out brain-damaged. He needs a healthy brain to experiment on. A depraved assistant takes it upon himself to sic one of the brain-damaged revivees upon a houseguest, a college chum of the physician's unknowing daughter. This young lady is made out to be attractive, bright with a full head of hair.

When she wakes up her head has been chopped off and hooked up to life-support tubing. Her hair (and scalp and skull) have been replaced by a transparent dome so that her brain is visible. She can only speak in a whisper (a bit of artistic license there). The make-up on her face suggests a concentration-camp victim and her agony and helplessness are palpable. She is hectored by the physician trying to get her to send nerve impulses to some severed arms mounted on a wall.

Enough. I understand that horror movies require innocent people to suffer, but at least up until Night of the Living Dead, the suffering was largely off-screen or was kept brief. This film tortures its victim unspeakably. There is no hope for her.

The only things I can say to the movie's credit are that the atmosphere is well evoked and that it plays almost exactly like one of those old "Tales from the Crypt" EC comics from the 1950s. Of course, they were sadistic, too. Don't let a child (i.e. anyone under the age of 70) see this movie; it could damage them for life.

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Screenplay, Directed and Produced by Herbert J. Leder, for Warner Brothers. Photography by Davis Boulton; Edited by Tom Simpson; Music by Don Banks. Starring: Dana Andrews, Anna Palk, Philip Gilbert, Karel Stepanek, Kathleen Breck, Alan Tilvers, Basil Henson and Oliver MacGreevy.

Not much thought went into this Herbert J. Leder special, but the underlying premises are quite interesting. 1500 leading Nazis were frozen in 1945 and German scientist Dana is experimenting on perfecting a way of successfully reanimating them. Unfortunately, rather than develop this plot, auteur Leder decides to pastiche a whole legion of science fiction and horror genres, featuring a mad scientist and his assistant in his lab, young thing and a buddy hunting for a missing friend, keeping a head alive action, face behind the mask business, clairvoyant discovery of facts via dreams, and zombie-like abortive guinea pig folks hanging around.

Logic is wholly absent as Leder refuses to make his story credible in a record-breaking bit of cinema cliche-mongering. Leder has well-endowed Anna Palk traipsing around in a white nightgown for three separate nights; on the fourth night she sleepwalks in a pink nightgown! We never return to the original teaser plotline, and the ending is even more foolish than expected.