The Frozen Dead

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: Screenplay, Directed and Produced by Herbert J. Leder, for Warner Brothers. Photography by Davis Boulton; Edited by Tom Simpson; Music by Don Banks. Starring: Dana Andrews, Anna Palk, Philip Gilbert, Karel Stepanek, Kathleen Breck, Alan Tilvers, Basil Henson and Oliver MacGreevy.

Not much thought went into this Herbert J. Leder special, but the underlying premises are quite interesting. 1500 leading Nazis were frozen in 1945 and German scientist Dana is experimenting on perfecting a way of successfully reanimating them. Unfortunately, rather than develop this plot, auteur Leder decides to pastiche a whole legion of science fiction and horror genres, featuring a mad scientist and his assistant in his lab, young thing and a buddy hunting for a missing friend, keeping a head alive action, face behind the mask business, clairvoyant discovery of facts via dreams, and zombie-like abortive guinea pig folks hanging around.

Logic is wholly absent as Leder refuses to make his story credible in a record-breaking bit of cinema cliche-mongering. Leder has well-endowed Anna Palk traipsing around in a white nightgown for three separate nights; on the fourth night she sleepwalks in a pink nightgown! We never return to the original teaser plotline, and the ending is even more foolish than expected.

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 Her hair (and scalp and skull) have been replaced by a transparent dome so that her brain is visible.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.

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

I just read the other user comment saying this film was not easily forgotten and I felt compelled to comment. I too saw this movie when I was young.. about ten years old... and here I am thirty years later and I suddenly felt compelled to Google it out of the blue. It really did haunt me and obviously still crosses my mind from time to time. I would not watch it again, either - there was something very sickening about it. I guess if I watched it now, used to the modern age of special effects and film techniques I would not be terribly impressed... but at the time it left it's mark. For that I give it positive rating even though I wish I'd never seen it in the first place.

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.