Frozen Scream

The text on the Belgium VHS-cover describes this film as being "remotely scary". What kind of stupid way to promote your film is that? You won't convince too many people into watching it if you're overly modest. Besides, if the writers of that piece of text really wanted to be sincere and honest, they should have put "irredeemably awful" on the cover instead of "remotely scary". Frozen Scream is one of the most retarded movies I've ever seen and it's definitely the most useless film listed in the notorious "Video Nasty" ranking. I made my millionth rookie-mistake wanting to see a film because of its reputation (one would think I had learned by now, but no…) but it deserves to be on that list as much as "Basic Instinct 2" deserves the Academy Award for best motion picture. It's easy to see how it ended up in the list, however, because there are a couple of nasty images of ax-murders (and the ax remaining stuck in the victims skull), but for each second of grossness, there are at least twenty minutes of sheer boredom, imbecilic plotting and – especially – horribly amateurish acting performances. The acting is so excruciatingly painful that, after a short while, you can't even pay attention to the few moderately interesting elements anymore and all you want to do is kill everyone around you and subsequently commit suicide. Sounds slightly exaggerated, you say? Just watch "Frozen Scream" and see for yourself. Particularly the female scientist is mind-bogglingly terrible and she deserves to have her tongue ripped out, just so that she can never produce another word again. The plot is boring and thoroughly uninteresting, but if you insist: a couple of diluted doctors want to become immortal and therefore begin to experiment on their patients and students. They kill people and bring them back to life as obedient slaves. "Frozen Scream" is unwatchable and if it wasn't for its listing in the DPP "Nasties", all copies righteously would have been vanished off the face by now. Ironic how this list, which initially wanted to prevent people from watching, is now responsible for certain idiots (like myself) wanting to see it.

There's a certain vibe one gets when exposed to movies of this caliber. It's like that time you went sniffing around sweet old auntie's cupboards and came across something not meant for your eyes. You feel a need to talk about it, but you can't since you've done a bad thing, might possibly cause some needless embarrasment for your dear auntie and what's worse, they'd label you as the broken pervert you are.

So what do you do? You pretend. Pretend you never saw it. You never even thought about it. See, phew, it's gone. What's Frozen Scream? Is Disney making ice cream now? Oh, boy...

But it doesn't work, now does it? Oh, no. Visions of awful music (also present in another audiovisual travesty called Don't Go Into The Woods), a completely botched dubbing track, pointless plot devices, dialogue scenes that feel like outtakes and quite random violence with no rhyme or reason fill your head. You have seen it. You have witnessed it. Now there is no turning back.

So how do you save yourself? Well, you try to see the funny aspect of this thing munching on your dying brain cells. Like the strange german accent of the main villainess, played by bargain bin movie veteran Renee Harmon. How to describe it? Well, she's no Ilsa, that much I can say.

First I thought the accent felt funny because it reminds me of Tommy Wiseau, but then it escalated into a theory that what if Mrs. Harmon was Tommy's mother in real life. It would explain SO MUCH, but then it freaked me out, so I had to change my theory. Just watch it thinking that's Jim Carrey in complete Man on the Moon -era Latka-mode and you're set.

Another thing that baffles me about this film is that it ended up on the Video Nasties-list, which probably is the main excuse as to why it was ever acknowledged at all. Now, after putting myself in the mindset of a conservative british auntie in the early 80s (might be the same auntie as in the first paragraph - or not) I can understand why so many violent films caused upheaval. By the standards of the time, something like Tenebre must've felt shockingly realistic. But this!?

My guess is that someone on the board of censors (or whatever they called their silly knitting crew) stumbled upon this waste of tape and just went "I can stop people from seeing this... I CAN STOP PEOPLE FROM SEEING THIS!" and that was that. They could've just let it be the ultra rare obscurity it is, but nooooo. Vinegar Syndrome did their thing and now literally anyone can see it. I seriously consider this a case where they just should not have bothered.

See how I struggle to actually say anything about it. Oh, you wanna hear about the scenes that probably caused the film's reputation as an obscene creation? Well, there is a barely topless woman, presented in a dream-like non-erotic manner, and the murder scenes are indeed graphic in nature. I might call them fairly realistic, if this was a homebrew film shot by a bunch of enthusiastic teenagers. What I think really caused its notoriety though is the henchmen. Those wild-eyed Harry Reems- and John Holmes-lookalikes seem like they must be packing some seriously hot stuff under those villainy robes. Like make-you-faint-by-a-sheer-glimpse -level hot stuff. Whatever it might be.

So by now you already know if you should or shouldn't see this, just as by now you know if you should or shouldn't have eaten all that Mac&Cheese that had been lying around in your fridge for a month. You wanna feel strange in a violated way? Frozen Scream is your gateway to that exact feeling.

I've still got nine or ten 'video nasties' to go before I have reviewed them all, but I'll go out on a limb here and say that, out of all 74 films on the list (including non-nasties Xtro and Shogun Assassin) Frozen Scream has got to be the worst. More boring than Unhinged, technically shoddier than Blood Rites, and less coherent than Revenge of the Bogeyman, this one stinks in ways that even Jess Franco hasn't managed.

Directed with zero finesse by Frank Roach and sloppily edited by the equally inept Matthew Muller, this fetid, chaotic mess plumbs new depths of awfulness to tell its dreadful tale of mad scientists searching for the secret to eternal youth. With wild-eyed mustachioed zombies in monks' robes, a crazed doctor and his unintelligible foreign assistant, a Halloween party with some incredibly bad dancing, a blonde with nice jubblies, and a monotonous voice-over that continually drowns out the characters' dialogue, one might at least expect a few unintentional laughs along the way, but the whole affair is so painfully clumsy in every department that I never cracked a smile.

Precisely what qualified this as a 'nasty' in the eyes of the BBFC is hard to say: if it was the patently fake axe in the head scene that had the censors bringing up their lunch, I'm surprised that ANY horror film actually saw the light of day in the UK.

If you should sit down to watch this diabolical dung-heap of a film, even though common sense tells you otherwise, why not play the BA_Harrison Frozen Scream Drinking Game© to make matters much less painful: just have a shot every time someone says 'immortal' and you'll be bladdered in no time.

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.

This is the sort of enterprise that is distinctively terrible enough to provide some laughs and be sporadically memorable, yet also just inept enough to be kinda dullish most of the time nonetheless. I enjoyed the highly variable performances, the women's big hair, the disembodied quality of dialogue entirely dubbed in post, the female villainess' cartoon Teutonic accent (strongly reminiscent of Madeline Kahn in "Blazing Saddles"), the blonde who acts like a Stepford wife, the dancers showing off and looking very foolish in the party sequence, the frequent editorial/narrative non sequiturs. But goofy as all this is, the film also just kinda lays there much of the time. It also frequently looks like hell, such that you wonder if it was shot not in 16 but 8mm--I mean, parts are THAT grainy. There are some delightfully terrible moments, yet I can't imagine sitting through this again.