Rainey Dawn 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

Leofwine_draca 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...

Michael DeZubiria I must have seen a lot more bad movies than the other reviewers who have reviewed this movie on the IMDb, because while it's definitely a long defunct sci fi flick, it wasn't THAT bad. In the world of bad movies, Frozen Alive is nowhere near the bottom of the barrel, but it's still pretty unendurable. The story is flat as a pancake and is never interesting, but the main problem is that it is so clearly two different kinds of movies squeezed into one, and the result just doesn't work.A scientist is working on a system of deep-freezing monkeys, and then decides to use himself as a human test subject. Unfortunately, just before his own deep freeze, his wife dies a violent death and he becomes the prime suspect. The police investigators, of course, come knocking just as he is entering deep freeze, which is not exactly a quick catnap that he can be shaken awake from.One half of the story deals with the scientist, a mid-50s or so man with salt and pepper hair and intense facial features, and his enormously alcoholic wife, a blonde bimbo who looks no less than 30 years his junior. It's too bad that they have no chemistry on screen whatsoever, otherwise this portion of the story would have been slightly less pathetic. The scene where he is holding her in his arms and telling her he wants them to try for a baby is highly disturbing.The other half of the story deals with the deep freeze experimentation. This is the part that would make this a sci fi movie, although there is nothing really sci fi about it. If he had frozen himself and woken up in another time, then you have sci fi. Instead, he just freezes himself and then wakes back up. Who cares? As a result, it comes off as nothing more than a goofy crime drama soap opera about a guy trying to design a perfect cryogenetic freezer. And it's a shame, because there's a chance that there could have been two separate, and much better, movies made with this story...

henri sauvage There's a Monty Python sketch called "The Adventures of Ralph Mellish", in which the mind-numbingly ordinary routine of a file clerk's morning commute is paired with feverishly dramatic narration and an ominous score. But the joke is that despite all the build-ups, nothing exciting happens to Mr. Mellish: By the side of the road, there's no dismembered trunk of a man in his late 50s ... no head in a bag ... nothing ... ("not a sausage", as our wacky friends across the water put it).It was a hilarious premise for a short comedy skit, but for this excruciatingly dreary 75-minute-long West German import (one hesitates to call it a "drama") it blows economy-size chunks.Dr. Frank Overton and colleague Dr. Helen Wieland have just been awarded a prize for their successful experiments in suspended animation via cryogenic freezing, using chimps as subjects. They believe the process is ready to be tested on humans, but the higher-ups are reluctant.Dr. Overton's wife Joan feels neglected because her husband's been working those long hours at the lab. The fact that he's spending them with hottie Dr. Helen (and that she can see Helen has a major crush on oblivious Dr. Frank) doesn't help, either.So Joan has taken to drowning her sorrows in drink, while stepping out with her old flame, journalist Tony Stein. "Aha!" you say: "Jealous lover murders her in a fit of passion, then tries to pin it on the scientist." No such luck. Joan finds an old Colt .45 pistol while drunkenly rummaging through a desk in Tony's flat. Tony tells her to leave it alone: it's an unregistered firearm. He could get in big trouble as well as embarrass his uncle (who's some kind of high muckity-muck in the department) if the police found out about it. When Tony -- who's just been given a tight deadline for an article -- finally gets fed up with her and kicks her out so he can get to work, Joan sneaks the pistol out in her handbag.She then staggers over to the lab for a shrieking showdown with Helen (although she doesn't quite work herself up to pulling the gun on her rival). Frank manages to calm Joan down, and takes her home. When Helen -- in what's either a stunningly clueless or a nastily passive-aggressive move -- calls up Frank to reassure him that Joan's embarrassing scene is all forgotten now, Joan finds out who's on the phone and flies into another jealous, hysterical rage. She threatens to kill herself with Tony's pistol.Over the phone, Helen hears Frank order his wife to give him the gun, then she hears a shot, and a scream. After a moment, Frank returns to the phone, tells Helen everything's OK now, and hangs up.So did Joan really kill herself, or did Frank shoot her by accident (or accidentally on purpose) while trying to take the gun away? Will we wait til Act Three to find out what actually happened? Not in this film, buster! We quickly learn that Joan's OK: Frank took the gun away from her, while she was still in shock over having just missed accidentally shooting herself. (She thought it wasn't loaded.) Frank removes the ammo clip, sees it's empty, replaces it and tells Joan the gun's "safe" now. Oddly, Dr. Frank is familiar enough with semi-automatic pistols to know how to eject the clip, but he neglects to check if there's a bullet left in the chamber (there is) or even ensure that the safety's on (it isn't). After a tearful reconciliation with Joan, Frank decides to return to the lab and take the experiment to its final stage, by freezing himself for the weekend. He promises Joan that after he's revived, they'll go off on a second honeymoon.Meanwhile, Tony's missed his pistol and comes looking for it, shortly after Frank leaves. Joan tells him their affair is over; she's going away with Frank. Then she finally manages to fatally shoot herself, once again by accident. (Ok, I'll admit that's tragic irony, in a sort of Darwin Award-ish way. Or maybe this was intended as slapstick humor, from the country which gave the world Dachau and Buchenwald.)Tony panics and bugs out without notifying the police. Meanwhile, back at the lab, unsuspecting Frank has himself quick-frozen. (FOR SCIENCE!!!)The next day, after the maid discovers Joan's body, the police show up at the lab with some very pressing questions. Especially after Helen reluctantly informs them of that incriminating little phone conversation with Frank.So, is our hero going to escape once he's defrosted, and prove his innocence while eluding the police, a la "The Fugitive"? Look, this film is only 75 minutes long, and the majority of these have already been chewed up by this irrepressibly drab and awful plot. While Frank's being revived, Tony's guilty conscience prompts him to call up the police and tell them the truth. So Frank's suspected of murder for considerably less than ten minutes of screen time, and cleared of it even before he's been thawed out.Hitchcock could have learned a thing or two from this director.There's a tiny morsel of something suspense-like embedded in the final moments of this dog, as Frank apparently got freezer burn (or something) and it takes a bit of a struggle to revive him. Unfortunately, by this point the viewer's interest is definitely DOA.There. In just a few minutes (unless you're a very slow reader) I've saved you from a fate far worse: squandering an irreplaceable hour and fifteen minutes of your life on this anti-thriller.