Frozen Scream

It's hard to believe this was made in 1975 or on the planet earth. It seems much older than that and alien on most levels. Whenever a scene seems pointless, rather than cut it down they instead have a detective character speak over the already speaking actors. It's something of a struggle to know who to listen to and the detective sounds like the famous voice over from THE CREEPING TERROR--a famously bad film that this film gives a run for it's money. There is other redubbing going on from time to time in a way that it seems several different actors redudded lines even within one scene playing for the same character.

Brief brief nudity and powerful low budget bad idea badness give this film more bad movie energy than either THE CREEPING TERROR or PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE. It does come a good ten years too late to be considered as much of a must see as those films since by the mid 70's bad films existed in such numbers it became more fashionable to love them than hate them.

But this deserves attention, directing, music, acting, etc etc all areas defy common logic and supersede lack of talent in a way that is, well, talented.

Rarely has a bad film been so much fun to me of late. There's an odd sort of dream scene--always another plus--and one vaguely thought inducing monologue about how science always tamper with nature even in curing disease.

To add to the greatness is of course the generally terrible nature of the copies to watch, giving it that late night broken telecine projector feel that will make bad movie fans swell with nostalgia or excitement. Oh yeah there's also a drunken priest character in one scene, the fun rarely stops in this one.

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.

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.

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.

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.