The Frozen Dead

When I was a kid in the early 1970s I always wanted to see this low-budget horror flick. It always seemed to be in the late night schedules and the newspaper TV listing synopses always made it sound great: frozen Nazis, mad scientists and secret experiments. However, I never did get to watch it and it seemed to vanish from the TV schedules and never seemed to be released on VHS or DVD. But thanks to the marvels of You Tube, I've finally caught up with it.



So, was it worth the wait? Well, it certainly has frozen Nazis - hung up in a freezer cabinet wearing their uniforms, complete with Iron Crosses. It also has a former Nazi scientist trying to thaw them out in order to help build a Fourth Reich.



Sadly, things aren't going according to plan - Dr Norberg can revive their bodies, but they all seem to have suffered brain damage and are homicidal maniacs that have to be kept chained up in a dungeon. His Nazi backers aren't happy, of course. So, he plans to bring in an unsuspecting American neurosurgeon. Just to complicate things, Norberg's niece (who knows nothing of his Nazi past or current experiments), turns up with her friend at his English castle, (all good Nazi scientists operated out of them in the mid-1960s), for the holidays.



For reasons best known to himself, Norberg's assistant murders the friend, blaming it on one of the unfrozen Nazis (played by Edward Fox - I bet he doesn't list this movie on his CV). So, as you do, they decide to decapitate her and revive her head.



Which is a logical step, I suppose, as Norberg has already had some success reanimating disembodied arms. A feat which impresses the American scientist no end.



For some reason, the severed living head is now blue and, not surprisingly, has something of a downer on Norberg and company.



To cut a long story short - the film drags on interminably with lots of talky exposition scenes and sub-plots involving the niece's attempts to find what happened to her friend, the assistant's body-snatching activities and the Nazi backers' plans - the head develops a telepathic link with the zombie Nazis, driving them even more crazy, the niece and, most importantly, those severed arms. In a final conflagration, the niece discovers her uncle's secrets, the chief Nazi turns up to shoot them and, you've guessed, it, those arms throttle Norberg and the Nazi.



The film ends with the head apparently begging the niece, the American scientist and the local police inspector, (who, for no reason at all, turns up in the last reel to shoot Edward Fox, who is strangling the niece), to let her die. I say apparently, because her mumbled dialogue is completely unintelligible.



This was one of a pair of horror movies shot by Goldstar at Merton Park Studios in 1966. The other one was It!, which also used to always be in the late night TV schedules in the early 1970s and which I haven't yet caught up with. The Frozen Dead is pretty typical of its time - an imported US 'star' (Dana Andrews with a bad German accent), tacky sets and special effects and one of those strange English village settings, where nobody thinks it odd that the place is overrun with Nazis. Not surprisingly, the local police inspector seems unfazed by the bizarre events unfolding on his patch - mid-1960s country coppers were always having to deal with mad scientists (often played by Boris Karloff) operating out of the local castle, if I'm to believe the British-made B-movies of the era.

Not a classic by any stretch of the imagination, The Frozen Dead is still quite amusing and, in places, even a bit creepy still. I'll have to step up my attempts to track down its companion piece: It!.