Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Frozen Alive


(1966) *

Man, you know a movie is bad when the only still you can find is the movie title! Okay, here it goes. Scientist Frank Overton and his colleague Helen are on the bleeding edge of technology. They have cryogenically placed monkees in suspended animation and revived them with no ill-effects. It’s always fun to play with monkees,

but the obvious next step is to freeze a human. Unfortunately, the guy funding this research gets cold feet (no pun intended) and refuses to allow the research to progress any further. Overton thumbs his nose at authority and volunteers himself as a test subject. Okay, all of that stuff was kind of interesting, but unfortunately the real plot of this movie is an annoying love square between Overton, Helen, and his annoying lush wife Joan, who is also screwing around with another guy. Can you follow that? No? Overton and Helen work together (there is nothing going on between them). Overton’s wife, Joan, is nonetheless jealous even though she’s banging another guy. Got it? Eventually Joan gets a hold of a gun and, let’s just say, expires. Overton is the prime suspect for her death, but wait, he’s frozen so how could he do it?

What’s funny is that the description for this film is that Overton’s wife is dead and the frozen Overton is the prime suspect. The reality is that Joan’s death only occurs near the very end of the film and her death is resolved before Overton is unfrozen. The police are never really involved at all. This is a boring movie that squanders every opportunity to be interesting. When people are “frozen” they basically just have electrodes stuck to them and they are covered in a clear shower curtain. I mean, for crying out loud, at least make the tiny bit of science fiction involved in this film slightly interesting! Terrible.

10 comments:

Johnny Sweatpants said...

What a breath of fresh air it is to see the Monkees in the (early) middle of October!

Bummer about the movie though.

AC said...

JPX, picking up on DCD's question- what IS your approach this year? Some sort of bottom-of-the-horror-barrel endeavor?

50PageMcGee said...

i love the suggestion that the monkees aren't human. what are they then?

Octopunk said...

Wow, another one-star winner. AC, I think the answer to your question is "movies I found at the supermarket."

AC said...

thanks Octo. i was beginning to suspect something like that.

JPX said...

The thing is, after 6 Horrorthons I've already covered the "classics" many times over. At this point I'm checking out some of the more obscure stuff, sometimes with great results (e.g., Night Tide). I've always wanted Horrorthon to be comprehensive so "the bad" has to be included with "the good".

AC said...

will the pre-blog reviews ever make it to onto the blog?

JPX said...

Sadly many of the pre-blog reviews no longer exist. We started this contest as an email thing and we never thought to keep the reviews. However, in the beginning our reviews were only a few sentences long. Octopunk set the bar high when he joined by writing comprehensive thoughful reviews. You can see some of the reviews in the archives. Wow, I used the word "reviews" in every single sentence! D'oh, I did it again!

Reviews.

Octopunk said...

I've got all the '04 reviews in a Yahoo folder, and a printout of the '03 reviews that JPX gave me, so they actually do exist. We talk about going from blogger to our own website someday; when we make that supreme effort I imagine all the reviews will be collected.

Heh. "Imagine."

Johnny Sweatpants said...

My early reviews would best be left buried. Sample from Suspiria 2003: "Dude, you've totally gotta see this movie because it's just so awesome it makes me sick!"

Malevolent

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