Frozen Scream

After opening narration with keen insight into the mysteries of life like I've listed up above, mad Dr. Sven Johnson (Lee James) and his evil assistant Lil Stanhope (Renee Harmon) are shown trying to reverse the aging process by experimenting on tied-up captives. They send out ridiculous-looking, hooded, laughing, bug-eyed henchmen with scythes to gather victims. Jumbled nightmare/flashbacks featuring wrist slashing, blood-drinking, a topless blonde and zombified teens chanting "love and immortality!" around a campfire will make you think you're losing your mind. Meanwhile, a band at a pool party sings "Jack Around the Shack" (?!) to the tune of Rock Around the Clock!

Nothing in this very bad (but rare) movie makes a lick of sense, the droning narration goes on and on (if fact it often goes right over some of the dialogue!) and the entire monotone cast acts brain dead. Harmon, who co-wrote the original story and produced, proves she is just as awful behind the scenes as she is on screen. Continental Video released FROZEN SCREAM on a double tape with the equally awful EXECUTIONER, PART II (which was also written by and starring Miss Harmon).

I dare you to suffer through TWO of her films in the one night!

This wretched excuse for a horror movie stinks from opening to final frame. I can be generous on low budget films if they have some kind of atmosphere or at least make me laugh, but no such luck with this one. Right from the opening you know you're in for a rough ride...murky photography, awful acting, indecipherable dialogue...only a serious masochist could pay attention to this for the full 80 minutes.

For the record, the plot seems to involve experiments on living people by two doctors searching for immortality. The wife of one of their victims/volunteers starts asking too many questions and there are various chases by the doctors band of zombie-like subjects, plus some lame murders and lots of dull talking. The acting is truly dire. The main doctor, a female actress with an accent like Zsa Zsa Gabor, absolutely crucifies every line of dialogue she speaks with the most stilted and lifeless delivery you could ever dream up. But things get even worse...In what I presume is normal procedure for film-making, the camera start rolling just before the actors take their cues to start acting, which I understand, but in this movie none of that was trimmed out, meaning many scenes start with people standing lifeless before suddenly launching into action. At least once there was a close up of the heroine's bored face before she suddenly broke into an animated scream of terror. Several times things approach Doris Wishman levels of badness, especially in a scene when the heroine tries to hold a door closed with her weight to keep a baddie from barging it in, yet the outside shot shows him trying the door which obviously opens outwards! But the biggest dose of madness hit me about 10 minutes into the film, when suddenly a (very boring, it must be said) conversation between two people was suddenly over-dubbed by a male voice narrating some blurb explaining the plot!! At first I thought the sound had gone wrong! Seemingly this was added to make the film make more sense and fill in motivation or extra detail about the main male character, namely a detective who is trying to work out what is happening. This hopelessly mis-judged narration crops up over and over again, usually starting right in the middle of an on-screen conversation between other characters. Both dialogue tracks can be heard at the same time, so you don't know what to listen to! God knows who thought this was a good idea.

I don't know if it's possible to defend this film in any way. Usually such audacious cruddiness would have me laughing and cheering them on, but Frozen Scream just bored me into doing the ironing while waiting for the thing to reach it's end. And to think this was once considered a "video nasty" in the UK!! Unbelievably bad – even worse than "Unhinged", which at least had decent lighting, and an editor who actually understood what "editing" means. So bad it should never have been released. View at your peril.

All I knew when I bought this was that there was a screaming woman in bikini and 80s hair on the cover - good enough for me! Little did I know that I was in for one of the most enriching bad-movie experiences of my life. Very few crap masterpieces achieve this pitch of manic hilarity: disastrously chaotic, sludgy, tawdry and completely unpredictable. Two different living rooms in two different provinces have been filled with friends gasping for air as they watched. It picks up steam as it goes along too, adding element upon useless, mind-boggling element. Of course the best one is that fricking detective, his jocular voice-over dropping on top of ongoing pointless dialogue scenes like an anvil; you never know when he's going to start spouting off and that adds suspense. The conniving head nurse with the charisma deficit has an accent so impenetrable you wonder why she wasn't dubbed, especially when the tall, Nordic-looking old mad scientist shows up, because he WAS dubbed - his voice is unmistakably that of a very articulate African-American man! Throw in those wasteoids chanting "Love and immortality" on the beach, gore effects courtesy of Heinz, and the un-oiled flywheel of a soundtrack, all coming at you non-stop one after the other. Jaw-droppingly bad.

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.