The Frozen Dead (1966)

(On Cable TV, July 2022) The corpus of zombie-Nazi movies has at least one more film than I expected, and The Frozen Dead does have the added interest of coming from the mid-1960s, well before Romero defined the zombie genre. It features Dana Andrews (in a late-career performance prefiguring what other Classic Hollywood stars would do for a paycheque in the 1970s) as a mad Nazi scientist—as if there was any other kind—working twenty years after the war to resurrect 1,500 frozen Nazis to revive the Third Reich. (Our history shows that it would have been far more efficient for him to create a hard-right cable TV news channel, but I digress.)  Much of The Frozen Dead is cheap and laughable—the sets are about as convincing as a high school play, the contrivances run sky-high and the writing is clunky. But there are some moments of poignancy as well—most of them focused on an innocent young girl who gets decapitated but kept alive, and provides the film with a surprisingly effective closing tag. Still, that surprisingly effective element seems overwrought for such a silly film—and the rest of it is close to a snooze. With writer-director-producer Herbert J. Leder clearly operating from an unbuilt trope, the film doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with Nazi zombies—it has a few lulls, especially when it doesn’t seem to want to go any further than the elements strictly essential to the plot. Keep your expectations low: The Frozen Dead remains a disappointment, even if it has a few things going for it.