-Grindhouse Fest is the special section in Celluloid Dimension where you can discover all the goodies…and baddies from the golden age of exploitation cinema. Have fun!
Directed by Frank Roach
Written by Doug Ferrin, Celeste Hammond, Michael Sonye
Starring:
- Renee Harmon as Dr. Lil Stanhope
- Lynne Yeaman (billed as Lynne Kocol) as Ann Girard
- Wolf Muser as Dr. Tom Girard
- Thomas McGowan (billed as Thomas Gowen) as Det. Sgt. Kevin McGuire
- Wayne Liebman as Father O’Brien
- Lee James as Dr. Sven Johnsson
Rating: 
This crummy, lo-fi chiller inanely philosophizing about love and immortality is sheer incoherent filmmaking at its absolute worst. Independently shot in 1975 in L.A., this cataclysmic cinematic debacle never had a theatrical release, only a home video release in 1983 when the video panic was at its censorious climax. It’s unfathomable amateurishness wrapped in cheapness that doesn’t conjure up any of the customary schlocky attractions one expects to enjoy from such wacky fare; it’s faulty low-budget movie logistics. Renee Harmon, lead actress and producer of Frozen Scream, concocts an eccentric horror yarn about two academic scientists investigating the riddles of immortality by conducting bizarre, nature-defying experiments on frozen humans. But no matter how wildly surreal the ghoulish imagery of this story is or how much metaphysical malarkey you can find in it, no amount of goofy cryogenic zombies can convince me that this could be filmable under the impractical direction of Frank Roach or Renee Harmon herself… (according to her, she was the one who had the directing role and Roach only the camera operator). Regardless of the truth of this hearsay, what is captured on the screen is objectively lousy. What I witnessed was a blatant and purposeless violation of every narratological principle you can think of – each scene transition is an accidental narrative non sequitur, where each seemingly collective footage acts individually as unrelated fragments of events. Worse yet, when the supernatural verbiage attempts to over-intellectualize something as jejune and self-explanatory as its gimmicky plot of mad scientists and zombies on the loose, its cinematic poverty ceases to be harmlessly risible and becomes just murderously pretentious.