The Man with Nine Lives

"The Man with Nine Lives" is my second favourite Boris Karloff movie from "Columbia" after "The Devil Commands."

The man himself doesn't make his first appearance until about 25 minutes into the film but it hardly matters as he makes up for it.

The film strives for a more claustrophobic look and succeeds brilliantly.

The number of characters aren't many but that's the idea of it.

Karloff always had the knack of emoting both sympathy as well as menace.

The rather modest budget is obvious in places but this film is still worth the viewing.

As a science fiction and shudder story buff, I thought this was the best of Karloff's Columbia "B" pictures. The "Black Room" (1935), "Behind the Mask" (1932), "The Devil Commands" (1941) (Probably my second favorite), "The Man They Could Not Hang" (1939) (Probably a close third favorite), and "Before I Hang" (1940). In terms of special effects and plot outline, this one keeps you on the edge of your seat to the very end.

The laboratory scenes in the proximity of a large underground glacier are unique. The chemistry lab including the "heavily concentrated poisons" is hair-raising indeed. With the right combination of lighting and shadow, as Karloff prepares the chemical experiments, the scenes within the underground laboratory are extremely eerie.

The maddest doctor of them all was clearly Boris Karloff.

Worth watching many times.

Roger Pryor is a doctor who has success 'curing' patients by lowering their body temperatures. He is urged to publish his results, but wants to know more about the work of a doctor who pioneered the science, then vanished ten years before. Pryor and his nurse/girlfriend Jo Ann Sayers set out to find the last known address of the doctor, Boris Karloff (who else?) to see if he left any notes behind. Not only do they find his notes, they find him..frozen in a room 91 steps (they counted) below his laboratory. They thaw him out, and he tells what happened a decade before..how 3 officials tried to stop him from using the technique on a wealthy citizen, and they all got trapped in the 'deep freeze'.

Oddly, none of them seem particularly surprised or upset (?) about their years on ice, but things get ugly fast; one man becomes very greedy concerning profits from the promising technique, and Karloff wants to continue experimenting on everyone else. It's a fun watch, but you can guess early on that Karloff is going to go completely off the deep end (only naive' Pryor and Sayers are very slow to catch on).

A doctor researching "frozen therapy" seeks out Boris Karloff, the therapy's originator. Boris has been missing from his island laboratory for ten years. After ignoring requests to stay off the island by locals, the doctor and his beautiful nurse discover Boris frozen in secret caves beneath the lab. Boris has been frozen along with a host of villagers. Through flashback it is learned these others came to arrest Boris for murder ten years earlier and they all wound up being gassed and frozen. This is the proof Karloff needs to vindicate his research. He sets out to duplicate his accidental results, his methods become increasingly Machiavellian. Ultimately he is his own undoing. This movie is hard to catagorize. The film makers tried to add shock to an interesting scifi story. The film succeeds in spite of the efforts to punch it up. The acting is uneven but overall this is a top notch "B" effort. The science is very plausible, a rarity in old laboratory films. See it and be pleasantly surprised

Boris Karloff plays Dr. Kravaal, a pioneer in human cryogenics who, at one time past, was conducting unethical experiments before he mysteriously vanished along with a small group of law officials who were apprehending him for his crimes at that time. We then fast forward ahead ten years to the 'present' day of 1940 where young Dr. Mason (Roger Pryor) and his fiancée/assistant, Judy (Jo Ann Sayers) are making great strides in the treatment of cancer patients through means of 'Frozen Therapy,' a process originally spearheaded by the missing Kravaal himself. Curious to know exactly what happened to the old doctor, Mason and Judy embark on a search to Kravaal's long abandoned residence. Descending many steps downward below the surface of his home, they discover the scientist mysteriously preserved alive inside his own ice chamber, along with the men who tried to arrest him. Once all the main players are revived, Kravaal remains as wrapped up in his experiments as ever, and is now determined to continue them at any price -- even if it means using the people around him as unwilling human guinea pigs. This was another in a series of similar mad doctor movies which Karloff made for Columbia Pictures in the 1940s. As far as this series go, this one is an interesting offering. **1/2 out of ****