Frozen Alive (1966)

The film is slow, ice cream melts faster that this film goes. I like some slower films but this one is too slow. I also like movies that put people on, or rather, in ice - frozen. The Man with Nine Lives (1940) with Boris Karloff is an example of a film I think is good concerning someone being frozen (or in a form of cryogenics).It's just like the plot reads: A man is working in a form of cryogenics, a state of suspended animation and decides he needs to test it. Just before he is frozen, his wife is killed and he is suspected of murdering her. - The film holds true to this description.It's nothing special, just a simple low grade B film that needed some spicing up and a little more speeding up to make it more interesting to me.2/10

Well it's a great title for a B-movie, but this simply has to be one of the dreariest and dullest films of all time – a film that even comes close to rivalling the obscure Filipino flick THE THIRSTY DEAD in terms of sheer awfulness. Although the title makes it sound like an engaging little thriller and the advertising sells it as a science fiction movie, in reality this is a boring little crime thriller from West Germany. Now, I'm all for German films from this period – the '60s krimi adaptations of Edgar Wallace stories were atmospheric and excellent – but this flick totally misses the ball, coming across more as a stilted soap opera rather than anything else.British director Bernard Knowles was a celebrated cinematographer in his day, shooting movies for Hitchcock, before turning his hand to direction with many television series during the 1950s. Unfortunately those TV episodes seem to have rubbed off in terms of this talky, plot-free mess. After an inordinate amount of time, a leading scientist decides to test his new suspended animation gear on himself, only for his wife to accidentally shoot herself at the same time. The police, naturally, suspect the scientist of murder...The problem is that this storyline doesn't actually happen until the hour mark – and before then we get talk, more talk, and some dialogue thrown in too. The script is unappealing, the characters unendearing and the actors frankly awful – there's more ham here than on your local chiller shelf at Tesco's. Delphi Lawrence as the drunken wife is the worst culprit, while other cast members veer between wooden and hammy. There's absolutely nothing in the way of action in the entire movie and the ending, while rushed, manages to feel dragged out in itself. This really is a non-starter of a film, with the short running time – 75 minutes – easily feeling like three times that amount. It took me three goes to finish watching FROZEN ALIVE and I consider myself somebody with a good attention span, so my advice is to give this one a miss...

As someone already said, this is a silly melodrama. It's more about a triangle with two scientists and the drunken wife of one of them. The fact that they are performing experiments in suspended animation using low temperatures is really not an issue. It is secondary to the efforts of the man to continue to live with this unstable women. At least her character is pretty believable. She is pathetic and unpredictable. The man is more than patient. The subplot has to do with the determination to perform these experiments on human subjects, which is met with resistance by the head of the lab. Even that is poorly portrayed and uninteresting.

I saw this one on a 4-film DVD set under the title "Frozen Alive." CAUTION: SPOLIERS This is a slow-moving melodrama masquerading as a horror film. A scientist's wife is cheating on him while he is conducting experiments, placing animals in suspended animation. The scientist decides to experiment on himself (his assistant pouts: "No! There's too much risk!")but he persists. While undergoing suspension, the annoying wife dies from a gunshot with the scientist the key suspect. The scientist isn't the only one in suspension as the audience becomes enraptured in disbelief. This amazing West German/England production is cheap and kinda seedy, and pretty dull. I ultimately shrugged at the end. Films like this are "programmers," films made merely to fill the needs of film promoters and distributers, likely used to fit into a double or triple-bill horror film package. While I've seen worse films (sometimes I think perhaps too many), this one is not at the bottom. Still, "Frozen Alive" is a film that should have appeared on "Mystery Science Theater 3000," a missed opportunity. I'm still not sure exactly what kind of film this is supposed to be.