Beyond the Valley of the Bad ... Frozen Scream is one of the most memorable no-budget horror oddities of the glorious 1970s, a magnificently bizarre heap of cinematic goop without peer, a sacred treasure to any self-respecting film nerd. Stumbling upon this extraordinary mess on a double-feature VHS with the equally deranged Executioner II was akin to tripping over the Holy Grail on a midnight drunk. The hilarious comic-book plot is about attempts to extract the life essence from involuntary citizens to obtain the secret of immortality, but as any true junkfilm junkie knows, plot is just an excuse upon which to hang a film experience, with all its aesthetic and structural detours making (or breaking) a great badfilm.
Frozen Scream seems to have been filmed in grainy 16mm, or else very shoddy 35mm, and the film quality is subpar, further diminished by crummy video transfers throughout its sordid distribution life. The sound recording is murky at best, and necessitates the use of (not) helpful voiceover narration to attempt to regain the story for the hapless viewer. Of course, the narration only further obscures and nullifies understanding, adding one more layer of confusion to this astounding cinematic misfire. One of the film's main flaws (or charms, depending on your viewpoint) is the fact that there is virtually no live sound, and characters are usually overdubbed. This lends yet another layer of otherworldly verisimilitude to the film, and the main heroine in the film is actually dubbed like a cartoon character, a very odd decision which lends the whole thing a compelling aesthetic artifice. This glaring combination of grainy visuals and muddy sound makes the whole scenario appear to take place in some sort of existential bubble, perhaps a hazy purgatory for lost souls - the viewer included; throughout Frozen Scream, the viewer is tempted to exclaim, "Where are we now?"
The acting is uniformly stiff, from a bunch of well-meaning underachievers, and one would not be surprised to find the players were yanked from the local community college drama class. One cannot blame these subpar thespians, for they were surely doing their best with the material they were given. Producer/star Renee Harmon is a fascinating character in her own right, a German emigre who fancied herself some sort of acting coach. Harmon's very presence launches Frozen Scream into the rarified air of vanity project misfires, and Harmon's later efforts such as Night of Terror do not disappoint in positioning her as some sort of latter-day Ed Wood character, a low-rent wannabe with delusions of grandeur. In particular, Harmon's hilariously failed attempts to deliver important exposition through her thick-as-mud accent renders comprehension null and void, adding yet another layer of obfuscation to any attempt at understanding this wholesale fiasco. Harmon, who looks for all the world like a fading European beauty queen, really steals the show, and she is the indisputable heart of Frozen Scream. Botching each and every one of her numerous lines acts as a shameless sabotage to the film, and illustrates why Ms Harmon may indeed be the female Ed Wood, an amateur filmmaker whose sheer audaciousness makes them bigger than life, and an instant legend. Harmon's partner in crime is a Fop male scientist named Sven: imagine Albert Einstein as assayed by Groucho Marx. As a couple, the two are absolutely hilarious, possibly the most ridiculous "mad doctors" ever committed to film; Harmon's hyper-masculinity jibes nicely with Sven's effeminate character.
The film gets off to a fine start, as Harmon starts the movie as a floating god head, speaking of the wonders of immortality over an angry rolling sea. A snide male narrator quips in response, "Why would anyone want to live forever in a world like this?", an important observation considering the film's wildly fatalistic finale. When our snide male narrator later quips, after one of Harmon's especially egregious dialogue scenes, "A pretty bad acting job, I'd say...", it is a purely self-reflexive moment in a film which seems, at times, proud of its own awfulness.
As for the locations, they shift willy-nilly from familiar to obscure, and the viewer never gets a sense of where he is, feeling trapped in this obtuse, creepy netherworld of odd and baffling places in the middle of nowhere. The haphazard, at times almost random editing goes a long way in creating a confusing, non-linear structure which adds greatly to the haunting, dreamlike quality of the piece, and it is in the inchoate structure, which defies narrative logic at every turn, that Frozen Scream really catapults itself (perhaps inadvertently) into "art film" territory. Yet at first appearing shoddy, the cutting is actually very astute, including subliminal flash cuts, an ubiquitous editorial motif during this time. Last, but not least, the music score is annoying, grating and intrusive, adding yet another layer of otherworldly (even confrontational) ambience to this most unique film experience.
The main theme - people consciously lacking a soul, and living in an eternal hell-limbo - is a good one, and although the scenario treats the theme in a roughshod way, it still manages to make an impact, surely in spite of itself. The finale, taking place in a dismal bargain-basement laboratory, actually works, due to the creepiness of the villain couple, the insanity of the dialogue, plus the images of frozen male corpses standing at attention, waiting for their assignment to kill. The heroine loses her battle against evil, and becomes one of the undead. Even better, in a rousing epilogue, the hero finally gets his dearest wish - to have his girlfriend love her "forever" - before the evil Ms Harmon stabs him in the eye with a hypodermic needle. Shock endings to strange movies don't get much more surreal than this, folks. (The "Frozen Scream," of course, is the awareness of being trapped in eternal life, the sought-after gift of immortality being, in fact, a curse.)
Frozen Scream is a remarkable cultural document, a shocking exercise in delirious, unhinged outlaw cinema. In fact, Frozen Scream passes over the viewer as some sort of lovely drug-fueled hallucination, and the wise viewer will not spend too much time trying to "understand" something so deeply disturbed as this incredible film. Frozen Scream comes across as something dangerously close to "pure cinema," film unspooling for the sake of the art form itself, and logic, understanding and entertainment be damned. Indeed, Frozen Scream is one of those sacred cultural texts which goes beyond the valley of the bad into that divine land of true cinematic hallucination, in good company with other vaunted cinema abstracts such as Plan Nine From Outer Space, The Atomic Brain and Blood Freak. Yet curiously, some sad losers call this astounding monstrosity "boring." Frankly, anyone who could be bored by this mesmerizing 85-minute mind-trip should be placed in a folder marked "If you're bored, you're boring."