The Frozen Dead (1967)

The Frozen Dead is a slow-moving film about the possibility of reviving frozen Nazi officers 20 years after the war ended. The film is almost like a prequel to the seventies sci-fi/horror flic Shock Waves, which was about defrosted Nazi zombies on an island. But, there is only the suggestion and potential of reviving Nazis in The Frozen Dead - it never moves beyond that. Dana Andrews stars as a German scientist who had developed the process to freeze the Nazi soldiers 20 years earlier. He has three of these frozen specimens hanging in a hidden chamber in his secret lab. Only, he hasn't worked out the process to defrost them safely - the subjects either die or come out mentally damaged. His own brother (Edward Fox in an early role) is one of the unstable results, prone to mindless violence. Then, he's contacted by other leaders of the leftover Nazi regime and informed that there are about 1500 frozen Nazi elites spread out over the world; the time has come for unfreezing and a 4th Reich, maybe. But, he still is unable to accomplish this, as he informs the disappointed leaders. To complicate matters, his niece (Anna Palk) arrives from school with a friend; she knows nothing of her uncle's experiments.

Though the prospect of a new Nazi threat is chilling, the story is boring. It does get rather ghoulish in respect to the niece's girlfriend from school: she is the victim of the scientist's assistant, the one who causes most of the problems in the film, either through incompetence or nastiness. He kills her in order to provide the scientist with a fresh brain to experiment on and she ends up as a still-living head for the rest of the film. There's no sympathy for her even from the story's nominal hero, a newly-arrived fellow scientist who also sees her as just another groundbreaking experiment. There are also scenes of various limbs, usually arms attached to a circuited wall, to lend further gruesomeness to the proceedings. It all comes off as another variation on the Dr. Frankenstein model. The female head obviously recalls similar scenes in The Thing That Wouldn't Die (1962). BoG's Score: 4 out of 10