Frozen Scream

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.

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.

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.

This wretched excuse for a horror movie stinks from opening to final frame. I can be generous on low budget films if they have some kind of atmosphere or at least make me laugh, but no such luck with this one. Right from the opening you know you're in for a rough ride...murky photography, awful acting, indecipherable dialogue...only a serious masochist could pay attention to this for the full 80 minutes.

For the record, the plot seems to involve experiments on living people by two doctors searching for immortality. The wife of one of their victims/volunteers starts asking too many questions and there are various chases by the doctors band of zombie-like subjects, plus some lame murders and lots of dull talking. The acting is truly dire. The main doctor, a female actress with an accent like Zsa Zsa Gabor, absolutely crucifies every line of dialogue she speaks with the most stilted and lifeless delivery you could ever dream up. But things get even worse...In what I presume is normal procedure for film-making, the camera start rolling just before the actors take their cues to start acting, which I understand, but in this movie none of that was trimmed out, meaning many scenes start with people standing lifeless before suddenly launching into action. At least once there was a close up of the heroine's bored face before she suddenly broke into an animated scream of terror. Several times things approach Doris Wishman levels of badness, especially in a scene when the heroine tries to hold a door closed with her weight to keep a baddie from barging it in, yet the outside shot shows him trying the door which obviously opens outwards! But the biggest dose of madness hit me about 10 minutes into the film, when suddenly a (very boring, it must be said) conversation between two people was suddenly over-dubbed by a male voice narrating some blurb explaining the plot!! At first I thought the sound had gone wrong! Seemingly this was added to make the film make more sense and fill in motivation or extra detail about the main male character, namely a detective who is trying to work out what is happening. This hopelessly mis-judged narration crops up over and over again, usually starting right in the middle of an on-screen conversation between other characters. Both dialogue tracks can be heard at the same time, so you don't know what to listen to! God knows who thought this was a good idea.

I don't know if it's possible to defend this film in any way. Usually such audacious cruddiness would have me laughing and cheering them on, but Frozen Scream just bored me into doing the ironing while waiting for the thing to reach it's end. And to think this was once considered a "video nasty" in the UK!! Unbelievably bad – even worse than "Unhinged", which at least had decent lighting, and an editor who actually understood what "editing" means. So bad it should never have been released. View at your peril.

The movie sets off with a very complex scenario that requires extended narration to explain. This narration along with the dialogue is fairly well written, however, it's sure to make you roll your eyes as you've heard all the lines before in pre-seventies horror and sci-fi. The acting is some of the poorest I've seen and I watch a lot of b-horror. It's like the actors are not even trying.

I can compare this movie to well loved bad films like "Asylum of Satan" and "The Devil's Rain" which are full of cool elements and atmosphere, but are extremely run-of-the-mill when it comes to plot. "Frozen Scream" has got some cool flashbacks to weird cult-like activity involving nudity. There is some pretty good gore including self-mutilation. I love the genre of 70's trash and if you do too I highly recommend this movie. I don't think it's so easy to track down. It could have become a cult hit, but it must have slipped through the cracks. My copy of the video pairs "Frozen Scream" with "Executioner II" as a double feature. "Executioner II", from the same man who brought us this film, is one of those movies about a Nam vet who returns to America and then cleans up the streets by killing pimps and criminals.