Before It Destroys Us

'It!' is a film from Herbert J Leder, the fellow who brought us ‘The Frozen Dead’. Like that film it has a knock out premise, but fails to fully deliver, although it provides a great source of entertainment along the way.

It! is basically a retelling of The Golem story. The Golem, if you recall, was a hugely strong, unstoppable man made magical monster built to protect the Jews of Prague. Sadly, his awesome power was misused and he had to be destroyed. I’m recounting it like it actually happened but, of course, it’s just a story.

In this update, the Golem is a pretty scary wooden sculpture which, having survived a warehouse fire without a singe mark comes to the attention of neurotic and downtrodden Roddy McDowall, who begins to use it to get to settle scores and get his own way.  It’s a bad move that can only end in a nuclear explosion, but then Roddy is already as mad as a hatter, given that he keeps his mothers dessicated corpse in a rocking chair and steals jewellery from the museum he works in to dress her up in.

Irritatingly, the film is shot at a pedestrian pace until it gets to the finale, at which point a lot of corners are cut at breakneck speed to provide us with a suitable ending. More urgency and some editing throughout could have given us a far more streamlined and exciting film but, nevertheless, it’s an interesting and unusual work enlivened by Roddy McDowall at his twitchiest and pretty Jill Haworth at her prettiest.

As a final note, I love these mock up newspapers that appear in the film. Great headlines, but they've forgotten to link them to any content.

Same here with this little lot. I wonder if the Government ever took that decision on development?

It!

Nazis On Ice

Nazis are good value, horror wise, aren’t they? The evil regime that keeps on giving.

In ‘The Frozen Dead’, Dana Andrews is attempting to establish a fourth Reich using the bodies of party members who chose to be cryogenically frozen when the war ended twenty years previously. The thawing process isn’t working, however, so the defrostees come out brain damaged or, in the case of a young Edward Fox, totally psychotic.

What the ‘kindly’ Doctor (who used to preside over a concentration camp and knew Josef Mengele) really needs is a living brain to study, which is soon delivered to him thanks to Fox’s strangling hands. The victim is a friend of his niece who is immediately decapitated and her head is kept in a box and fed a glucose diet. When the box is opened, the severed head scowls angrily – a look I recognise (and fear) from my own wife. When the box is shut, she uses telepathy to call to her friend and to wind up the frost damaged Nazis. It’s a powder keg with a dynamite girdle and nitrogylcerine wheels.

Extraordinary in many ways, few of them good, ‘The Frozen Dead’ is not necessarily terrible, just totally ridiculous. There’s a scene where the American hero is exploring the ‘castle’ (it’s actually just a large house) and, as he explores the dungeons, he comes across a skeleton manacled to the wall. Why? He doesn’t even register surprise, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Why do the frozen Nazis swing around in the freezer? Have they been doing that for twenty years? Couldn’t they have been secured a little better?

The daftest elements are, naturally, courtesy of the severed head: blue, bald, covered in tubes, its baleful presence is exploited to the full and its scornful, hate filled expression is the stuff of nightmare / farce. The bald blue bonce even speaks at the end (impossible, but why start applying logic now?), before using sheer willpower to revenge itself on its nasty Nazi tormentors. Ludicrous. Recommended!

The Frozen Dead