Le château des monstres

20 years after WW2 has ended, a German scientist living in London, attempts to revive the frozen bodies of several Nazi leaders. Of course, there are some problems along the way (especially "woman problems")... The main problem however with this film is that it has absolutely nothing to say. Besides a ludicrous story, this film also contains some very "unintended-funny" scenes. Especially the dead girl's head is great! "It seems as though the head forced this glass of water out of my hand!" Needless to say that the dialogue, especially near the end of the film, is superb. This alone makes the film worthwhile. There are films that are far worse than this one (and with worse actors), but this comes pretty close too. Oh, and watch out for Edward Fox as one of the crazed Germans in the basement(!). 3/10

One of the triumvirate of iconic '60s disembodied head movies and thematic intermediate between the heady love story of "The Brain That Wouldn't Die" (1962) and the neo-Nazi delirium of "They Saved Hitler's Brain" (1968), "The Frozen Dead" finds former Third Reich scientist Doktor Norberg (Dana Andrews) attempting to revive frozen members of the master race two decades after the end of the war. Unfortunately, the thawed übermensch are mentally defective and without a living human brain to study, Norberg suspects that resuscitating the rest of the Nazicles is doomed. Hoping to head off failure, his whinging assistant Essen (Alan Tilvern) kills Norberg's visiting niece's friend (Kathleen Breck), whose head the pernicious but resourceful doktor manages to keep alive in a box in the lab (complete with an cranial observation dome). The niece gets suspicious, a romance blossoms, more Nazis show up, Norberg wires up the head to a wall of arms...it just gets better and better! The movie effectively evokes a sense of trapped helplessness - you can almost feel the disembodied head's powerless anguish or the panic of the poor henchman left to freeze to death amongst the icy Nazis. While not great art, "The Frozen Dead" is a well done, low-budget shocker that deserves an extra rating point for being surprisingly creepy despite the inherent silliness of the premise.

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.

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!

The Nazis' finest (who, in my opinion, couldn't possibly be all that fine) are corpsicled in preparation for the future, apparently a couple of decades downstream. Dana Andrews, a top German scientist, is now trying to thaw them out, but he just gets one basket case after another; brain damage seems to be a major problem. His henchman, knowing that Andrews wants a fresh head with which to work, kills the visiting friend of his daughter, who becomes the head-in-the-box. Naturally, she's a bit angry about this state of affairs. Naturally, all the Nazis end up dead. At the end of the movie, there's the problem of what do do with the head-in-a-box. No one suggests grad school. Instead, sans lungs, she says "Bury me!" Well, that probably is better than grad school. Actually, though it's easy to make fun of this movie, it's not a bad flick.