The plot of Frozen Alive concerns a couple of scientists named Helen and Frank who are working with a new form of science called cryogenics. The film is a tedious affair and if one were looking to put a positive spin on it, they could say that the time was used wisely for plot and character development. While technically that is the case, the film tends to drag on for what seems an interminable time and while bad dialogue or acting or editing could be tolerated, a movie that taxes a viewer’s patience is a bigger sin than any one of those. Eventually, things start to pick up as much as they possibly can when a gun manages to go off into the body of a woman and it is not soon after that the frozen aspect of the title comes into play, though having nothing to do with the newly deceased.

You have to imagine that Bernard Knowles did not start off to make a bad picture, most people probably do not, but the man had to have known that his end product was a little lacklustre. The acting is all right and the script by Evelyn Fraser is not all that bad, but it is hard to imagine what they were thinking when they decided to forgo anything that could have been considered excitement for the first hour or so of the feature. The characters were not wholly uninteresting and for the most part, it plays out like a very soapy melodrama, but if one were to judge this film by its poster or title, which most assuredly did, soapy melodrama is not what most would guess this movie to be about.

At the end of the day, the audience learns little about the science which takes a backseat to everything else essentially, and by the point where it comes into play, nobody cares. There is what people would call a slow burn in terms of pacing sometimes and then there is this film, which is indeed quite slow, minus the burn. Frozen Alive is not a terrible waste of celluloid, but nothing ultimately worth watching either.

1 out of 5