Frozen Alive (1966)

Very disappointed :(

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Wow...from the description from Netflix, this sure sounded a lot more interesting than it was. The story was supposedly about cryogenic suspension and I was hoping for a kitsch classic like "The Frozen Death" or "The Brain That Wouldn't Die". Instead, it was a very slow story that bored me half to death.The film will have the viewer wondering what so many in the film have German accents. This was apparently a German-British production but why all the Germans spoke English and why there were so many never really was explained. The star of the film is Mark Stevens--an American most viewers won't recognize. The rest of the cast are British and German unknowns.As the movie begins, you see that the nice scientist interested in cryogenics (Stevens) has a hopelessly unstable and alcoholic wife. It's actually rather hard to understand what he sees in her--she's really awful. In fact, much of the first portion of the film is more soap opera than anything else--with some amazingly shrill and over-the-top performances and a script that seemed dull and confusing. Later, when the wife accidentally kills herself, the blame is placed on Stevens who has the worst luck trying to find an alibi, as he was in cold storage at the time--and this, sadly, is the only element of cryogenic freezing in the film. No mad monster, no raising the dead--just a soapy murder mystery which happens to include cryogenics.Frankly, this film isn't worth your time. It's not campy enough to be fun, has a lot of bad acting, is a very dull script and inspires yawns instead of interest. Skip this one--life is too short to waste your time with this.

It has apparent that I liked this film a bit more than most. Yes, it has a ludicrous premise behind its story of a man frozen alive and then brought back to life afterward whilst an impending murder investigation looms overhead unbeknownst to him. Yes, it has some bizarre love triangle between a scientist with some floozy of a wife(but a buxomly, beautiful blonde floozy of a wife)and a German scientist helping out on a project involving freezing chimps. Well, the wife becomes suspicious of her husband and the German Girl Helen(played by the attractive Marianne Koch)thinking that there is more to their monkeying around. Things go into melodramatic mode and what we have really is more of a melodrama with science fiction overtones than a science fiction movie. It's cheesy; it's campy and fun - at least to me. The acting is fairly good for the most part: Mark Stevens looks incredible tired though through most of the movie. His wife is played by Delphi Lawrence giving a good portrayal(in a movie like this it must be emphasized)of the unstable doctor's wife. Koch is attractive and adequate. British character actor John Longdon is very good as Dr. Hubbard a friend to the two scientists and their work. I knew he was familiar to me when I saw him and then heard him speak. This was his last film. The director Bernard Knowles was a journeyman television director in Britain and this film has that look and feel for the most part plus a low budget. The real annoying part, if you will, was that when I started out to watch the film I had no idea it was a foreign film. Afterall it was called Frozen Alive on my DVD box and showed Mark Stevens on the cover. The film opens and we get Longdon, Stevens, and a girl who is said to be German, but then all the auxillary characters appeared to be German with the thick accents. Oh well, that is one over me. Most of them were not great thespians either. Frozen Alive is a poor film in many regards, but I enjoyed the tense atmosphere of emotion and the story despite its legion of flaws. It is one of those classic bad films that can be so much fun to sit down and watch.

Here's the problem with this picture. The description on the back of the case (AMC Monsterfest Collection: Cult Classics- Collection 2) indicates a good movie. The description mislead me and this movie became a huge disappointment. This is what the description says (more or less): 'A scientist freezes himself. His wife is murdered. He becomes the prime suspect.' Now I thought that would be a good movie. Heck, it could have even been a great movie. I thought the husband would thaw out and then he'd be accused of murder. He'd go on the run. Case of mistaken identity. You know, Hitchcock stuff. No. You wanna know what we get. We get an hour of his wife complaining about her husband's hot assistant, the wife cheating on her husband, and then the wife shooting herself! Are you kidding me? Of course, now the husband is frozen (Alive!) and has no idea his wife is dead. But the police think he did it. So now I'm thinking alright, I had to wait through a bunch of crap, now to the good stuff. No good stuff! The man who his wife was having an affair with (He was there when she accidentally shot herself) goes to the police and tells them what happened. So the police stop the investigation and the husband thaws out. The end. That's it. No man-hunt. No interrogations. They don't even have a scene where they tell him is wife is dead. It just ends. It was truly a bad movie. You see these are the kind of movies that should be remade. You know the old saying: Don't fix it if it ain't broke. Well Hollywood needs to quit trying to fix good (sometimes great) films and remake garbage like this and try to make it better. That should be the definition of a remake. Heck, the Sci-Fi Channel could remake this into a TV movie and it would be better than the original and most of the bad movies they usually have on there. Overall, it's just a bad movie.

This completely worthless piece of cheap European-produced 60's guff is available in a DVD box-set called "Tales from the Future", along with eleven other titles that really don't deserve to be seen by anyone. In fact, a more suitable – albeit less appealing – title for the collection would have been "Tales that belong in Oblivion for being so crappy". "Frozen Alive" is a boring, overly talkative, tension-free and soporific romantic melodrama that only just pretends to be a Sci-Fi story. A scientist and his attractive female German colleague are performing scientific experiments on chimpanzees, like putting them in the deep freezer for three months, but what they are really doing is fall madly in love with each other. Meanwhile, the scientist's alcoholic wife is killed by her lover and he gets blamed for it. Of course, it's rather suspicious of him to volunteer as the first human guinea pig immediately after his wife goes missing. Everything about this tiresome little production is insufferably mundane, from Bernard Knowles' motionless direction over the incredibly wooden acting performances of the two leads onto the irritatingly clichéd dialogs. Delphi Lawrence's performance as the arrogant wife in a seemingly permanent state of drunkenness is believable, but boring & pointless nevertheless. If you want to see nonsensical stories about triangular relationships and married people nagging to each other, you're probably better off watching "The Bold & the Beautiful" or any other randomly sappy Soap Opera show, instead of wasting money on a DVD-collection that supposedly contains Sci-Fi movies. Bah!