THE FROZEN DEAD is a 1966 British horror film, written and directed by Herbert J. Leder. It's a title I finally caught up with the other day, after seeing various stills from it in books and magazines over the years. The movie has many plot elements that are ripe with possibilities, but overall it's rather disappointing.
The story is set in contemporary times. Dana Andrews plays Dr. Norberg, a Nazi scientist --yes, you read that correctly--who, for the last 20 years since WWII ended, has been working on reviving frozen human beings. What is left of the Nazi party has been funding Norberg's experiments, and they have even set him up at a large palatial estate outside of London. (Apparently leftover Nazis have plenty of money to spend on wacky projects.) Norberg's experiments have not been very successful--he has revived a group of German soldiers, including his own brother, but the men are imbeciles, locked in a dungeon-like room on the estate. Norberg surmises that he needs a living, functioning human brain to study. Norberg's young niece Jean (Anna Palk) and her friend Elsa (Kathleen Breck) unexpectedly arrive for a visit, and very soon after, Norberg's bungling assistant Karl (Alan Tilvern) kills Elsa, giving Norberg the opportunity to remove the victim's head and use her brain. Norberg and Karl try to convince Jean that Elsa abruptly left without telling her, but the woman is suspicious, and she attempts to get a newly-arrived American doctor (Phillip Gilbert) to help her find out what is going on. Elsa's head still retains a spark of individual humanity, and she tries to mentally contact Jean. Eventually Norberg and his Nazi buddies get what they deserve.
The first thing one must deal with when discussing THE FROZEN DEAD is the idea of casting Dana Andrews--an actor about as American as they come--as a Nazi scientist. There were plenty of fine character actors at this time in England who would have been much better casting. I assume Andrews was picked to give the film a star name (albeit a fading name), but he seems ill at ease in this role, despite his attempt at a German accent. Anton Diffring would have been perfect here--he also might have given the role a bit more of a nasty attitude. At various times in the story Andrews' Norberg complains to his Nazi overseers about their methods, which comes off as unintentionally funny--what did he expect??
Dr. Norberg not only has a fully equipped secret laboratory, he has a wall of disembodied arms, and a giant freezer stocked with Nazis on ice (and still wearing their SS uniforms). The freezer has a full-length glass window to look through, and it resembles a supermarket display. With the Nazis-on-ice and the mentally unbalanced group in the cellar, one expects all these soldiers to eventually break loose and cause havoc, but they never do. The script has far more talk than action, and Leder's leaden direction doesn't help matters.
Thankfully we don't get to see what happens to transform Elsa into a living brain, but the result is quite unsettling. Elsa's head is on a table, hooked up with tubes and electrodes, and constantly bathed in a eerie bluish light. It's even more grotesque than the living head in THE THING THAT COULDN'T DIE, and Elsa's ability to use her mind to affect others is also used in that earlier movie. A big problem is that Elsa has very little onscreen time before she is transformed, so the viewer doesn't get a chance to know her as a character.
Anna Palk is okay as Jean--at one point she actually wanders around wearing a nightgown while holding a candle--but she's not as memorable as any of the Hammer scream queens. Just about all normal leading men in any British horror film made during this period are unmemorable, but Phillip Gilbert is particularly so--he acts as if he's in a sitcom. When Dana Andrews reveals Elsa's living head to Gilbert, instead of reacting with shock or revulsion, he has a goofy grin on his face. The rest of the supporting cast is quite bland, with the exception of a very young Edward Fox, who gets little to do as Andrews' deranged and mute brother.
The boring cast is one main reason why THE FROZEN DEAD doesn't live up to expectations. The movie tries to be in the Hammer or Amicus manner, but it doesn't have the notable performers those companies used to uplift their fantastic stories. The sets and production design are all right, but not much creative use is made of them. Don Banks, who worked for Hammer a number of times, contributes a fine music score, but many of the most important sequences in the story are without musical backing.
If THE FROZEN DEAD had been made ten or twenty years later, I'm sure it would have been far more lewd and explicit--whether it would have been a better movie is another matter. There are a number of directors at the time who were familiar with this type of material, and would have been able to make something more out of it, such as Freddie Francis, John Gilling, and, dare I say it--Jess Franco?
When one finds out about a movie that features disembodied parts and frozen Nazis, one expects it to be diverting--but for the most part THE FROZEN DEAD is as stiff as the SS troops in Dr. Norberg's lab.
No comments:
Post a Comment