Frozen Scream

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.

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.

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.

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.

A pretty lame horror flick about a scientist's attempts to make people immortal. Unfortunately, his immortality process destroys the victim's soul and personality. This is a bad movie, featuring several funny parts. I particularly liked the scene of two women in the hospital talking, when out of nowhere the policeman narrator's voice is dubbed over the conversation. It's just sloppily put together.

Beyond that, the only point of interest is that H. Kingsley Thurber did the music. He also provided the exact same music for Don't Go In the Woods. I'd say over half of Frozen Scream's music appeared in Woods, also. For fans of DGITW this is certainly of historical importance, but ultimately Frozen Scream is not worth your time.

*dec. 2004. I watched it again. I now value Frozen Scream. Some stretches of boredom, but more amusement than I had originally thought. Don't go too far out of your way to see it, but bad movie fans should find something of interest here.