Frozen Alive — Frozen Alive(DVD)
Frozen Alive is a prime example of an exploitation film that’s very different from its promise/title/hype. On paper, this early ’60s suggests it’s going to be a tense thriller/ Sci-fi/ horror about folk being put in suspended animation- but in reality, it’s a soapy drama focusing on a few doctors, with some fleeting crime thriller touches in, and the freezing action only really takes up about 20% of the film. Here from Cheezy Movies is a region-free DVD release of this picture.
Frozen Alive is from the year 1964-it was a west German/ UK production, captured in rather shaky & cheap black and white stock. The film was directed by Manchester-born Bernard Knowles- he had sixteen feature-length credits to his name. These went from the slow-burning haunted house mystery A Place Of One’s Own (1945), onto war drama featuring a young Richard Attenborough The Lost People (1949), tongue-in-cheek cold war thriller Norman Conquest (1953), criminal on the run drama Hell Is Empty (1967). Though he is probably most known as a Cinematographer, with credits such as The Thirty Nine Steps & Jamaica Inn.
The film focuses on forty-something American Dr. Frank Overton(Mark Stevens), who with the younger German Dr. Helen Wieland(Marianne Koch) are working on processes to put animals into suspended animation. The company they work for employ a mix of ageing / rather pleasant vicar like English men, and brash Germans- so racial cliches tropes are in place.
It moves from a rather lengthy and bland talk about the science behind suspended animation, in lab at times soapy dialogue interaction, bickering between Dr Overton and Joan his boozy, brash, and having an affair wife Joan (Delphi Lawrence), and we get brief glances of the processes behind the suspended animation. At a point, a gun is awkwardly dropped into the plot, and in the last twenty or so minutes of this one hour and seventeen minute we see a human is frozen.
For the most part, Frozen Alive plays like a rather hammy relationship drama- with Joan meeting up with her ex-German journalist boyfriend, and will/ they won't they romance between the two doctors. When the gun appears, this adds slight tension/edge to the thing. And of course when the human body is frozen- we have some edge/tension.
Acting wise Lawrence as the Doctors wife is probably the most memorable here, and she gives a great OTT drunk performance. Stevens is ok as the lead Dr, though he felt like he could have turned up in an early Herschell Gordon Lewis film- with his slicked-back hair, cheap bad-fitting suit, and rather seedy middle-aged man persona.
The print on the DVD is fairly rough ‘n’ ready, and looks just a step up from VHS. And with most Cheezy Movies this is a bare-bones affair, with just a trailer reel.
Frozen Alive is ok for what it is- a doctor-focused drama, with fleeting touches of thriller & (very) light Sci-fi touches. But it's most certainly not what its title, poster, and hype line promise. So, take from that what you will.