I can’t find an actual reference to this film’s budget anywhere, but it was a Columbia film so I’m guessing “not high”; Harry Cohn never liked spending money even on his big films that merited the cost, so for something I imagine he would’ve considered a piece of shit I can’t see him being lavish… but Nick Grinde did get enough to work up a pretty good laboratory set, which is good cos most of the film will take place there. Everson reckons all the Karloff “mad doctor” films were fairly similar, and in this case that extends to his character name (Dr. Krevaal) being oddly like his previous one, and in this case he’s also been working on an experiment involving reanimating frozen (though not technically dead) bodies… but this time round, he’s become the unwitting subject of his own work, having become frozen in his own ice chamber ten years ago along with the men he was demonstrating it to; he’s thawed out by a doctor searching for him, and now he needs to find out why they didn’t die and rediscover his own work… if the other men will let him, of course. I had a lot of fun with this film, which runs at some 74 minutes which is about ten minutes longer than the rest of the films in this series, so the story has a bit more room to breather; Karloff, obviously, is having a blast as Krevaal who’s less bothered by the fact he’s been “dead” for ten years than that he’s still alive now, and the rest of the cast is good too. Plus it’s rather more judicious with using music than the previous film, which didn’t use it enough. Only serious problem was the noticeable slump in picture quality in the last ten minutes or so, but I gather that’s a problem on the older DVD release so maybe it’s an issue with the existing print? Whatever, otherwise this was great fun.
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