Memorable, crazy movie

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This is one of the silliest of Karloff's mad doctor programmers, and one that is loaded with a ton of opportunity for ridicule. How about the Ice Mad Man Cometh, or For Your Ice Only, and if you're in the mood for the obscure, I Only Have an Ice Room for You. This is an insipid unintentional comedy where after being thawed out of his own ice castle, Karloff takes desperate measures to assure that his next experiment will succeed.It begins when scientist Roger Pryor and nurse Jo Ann Sayers decide to visit ice recovery expert to get Hus help on their own experimentation and find him locked in his own chamber. Telling them of how he was accused of killing a patient during an experiment, he later froze the men who interfered. Defrosting them like chicken, he finds that they are still not ready to allow his experiment to go forward. This leads to more mayhem as Karloff remains calm but gets loonier and loonier.While this ain't quite Arsenic and Old Ice, it's actually quite funny in the way it takes itself way too seriously. A lame script and cheesy sets puts this on par with the schlock horror films that PRC and Monogram were putting out. At least with those, you knew what you were getting into. Watching this makes me wonder if the alleged freezing of Walt Disney was influenced by this.

From the vantage point of today (6/21/2014) as I write this, it seems incredible that a film made in 1940 treated the subject of cryogenics as if it were as common as, well, the common cold. The opening scroll mentioned that medical science agreed that disease can be arrested and life can be prolonged by freezing human beings. I'm aware that the concept is still being researched with significant results, as in lowering body temperature to treat victims of drowning, but you'd think a whole lot more progress might have been made by now.Well I'm surprised it took me so long to run across this little Karloff gem. It turned up this morning of all places on Antenna TV, generally better known for it's airing of old TV programs from the Sixties. Actually it was in the Sixties when my dad gave me the run down on actors like Karloff, Chaney and Lugosi and I've been a fan ever since. The film includes elements of horror and sci-fi with a little bit of murder mystery to boot, featuring Karloff once again as a mad, but seemingly normal scientist working for the betterment of humanity. It's only when his work is threatened that he resorts to killing an antagonist. Actually, the scene where he shoots Bob Adams (Stanley Brown), in the back no less for destroying his formula, seemed to me to be a bit over the top. Granted, I'd be PO'd too, but gee, I don't think I'd kill anybody over it.Probably the best part of this flick was the set design of Dr. Leon Kravaal's (Karloff) impressive lab, one of the better ones this side of Frankenstein. And not just one, he had multiple labs in different parts of his house. Which made me wonder, how long would it have taken the good doctor to set up his working lab through a secret tunnel and another hundred feet under ground? That's some kind of dedication.There were other things I had to think about as well as the story got under way. Why would Dr. Mason (Roger Pryor) and his nurse/fiancée Judy Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) embark on their mission to find Dr. Kravaal's missing research wearing business suits. That seemed just a little too formal for me, particularly when they started crawling around through Kravaal's tunnels and labs. Not that this was unusual for films of the era, but I don't understand what would motivate anyone to be attired that way.But you know what really blew me away? When the doc and his assistant rented the boat from old Pete Daggett (Ernie Adams), do you know what the fee was - twenty five cents per hour plus a dollar deposit!!! Holy smokes, and I thought the whole concept of freezing human bodies was scary!

The Columbia Karloff Pictures would recycle generally the same idea, incorporating touches here or there to remove identical ties to each other. Thematically, Karloff portrays a dedicated scientist whose goal is to benefit mankind through some type of medical experiment to prolong life. His work is treated with skepticism, unbelief, and scorn by local authorities and medical doctors who would find his experiments too fantastic to accept despite all his efforts to persuade him otherwise. The use of human guinea pigs(..voluntary, as often was the case)would not be received well by those who were critical of his work, or found his experiments too far-fetched or, as often was the case, morally objectionable. But, as in many of these film's story arcs, Karloff's scientists would proclaim that in order to achieve breakthroughs in science, sacrifice had to be made, most of the time those volunteers perhaps would've survived while under his care if those who oppose this new, "dangerous" science hadn't of interfered. The opposition would balk that the threat of human life was too great and so this dilemma always seems to disrupt Karloff, plague his desires to bring good to the world, not evil. The Man With Nine Lives establishes the experiment as "frozen therapy", cryogenic science as a method for benefiting mankind, with Karloff's Dr. Leon Kravaal, found in a chamber frozen in ice in his abandoned secret laboratory by Dr. Tim Mason(Roger Pryor) and his nurse/fiancé Judith(Jo Ann Sayers)as they were hoping to uncover notes of his research since he's known as the father of this type of growing medical practice many consider the future for helping the sick and dying. When it's discovered that there are four others in another room of the chamber where he was found, their lives are thrown into a crisis..those who threatened to imprison Kravaal for his frozen therapy, endangering a patient he had under cryogenic sleep, are awakened and despite the obvious success before them threaten to ruin all the potential benefits which could reach the world. See, when threatening to arrest him, Kravaal concocted a solution which could poison them if the liquid were to erupt into gaseous form, when breathed could cause harm. Instead, this solution, as written down while preparing it, stabilized those who ingested it, and so, for ten years, those in the ice chamber rooms remained in a cryogenic state, but kept alive. Unfortunately, Kravaal's nemesis is a greedy nephew who wants the inheritance of his patient in cryogenic sleep, and this maggot rips up and burns the exact written details of the solution which would in fact help prolong human life. This causes Kravaal to shoot him in the back, with others a witness to the murder..seeing as they pose a threat to his developing another solution, in the name of science, he will do whatever it takes to achieve again what has been lost thanks to the vile stupidity of another.In these kinds of movies, it never ends well for Karloff's scientists. He often achieves extraordinary results, paying the ultimate price, a sacrifice is often made so that others may benefit. In most of these films, Karloff would succumb to his human frailties such as revenge against those who opposed him or caused damage to the potentiality of success in his work. Unlike the mad science of Frankenstein, these Karloff Columbia Pictures grounded their stories in a modern setting, despite how outrageous the experiments might seem, often they still offer a realism, debating how far one should go to increase life expectancy. Those that find his work crazy, most of these films show that Karloff, at first anyway, was completely sane and determined to help his fellow man if allowed to continue his work unabated, and this was so often not the case.In most of these movies(..like Before I Hang or The Man They Could Not Hang)Karloff is provided a loving daughter who can reason with him in his moments of emotional blackness and despair, even as he threatens the lives of others who have railroaded his mission to bring medical breakthroughs to humankind. The Man With Nine Lives almost entirely takes place within the cramped confines of Kravaal's laboratory, holding prisoner those who were to arrest him, using them as guinea pigs for his experiments concerning the development of a new solution, needing to test his theories, raising the ire of his contemporaries, Tim and Judith, who can see the lengths he's willing to go to achieve success. Again, the story will seem familiar if you have watched other movies Karloff made for Columbia Pictures..if you like them, I think you might like this one as well.

I have a feeling that many of us have entertained the whimsical notion, as we dragged ourselves to work in the morning, that it might be nice to have hot coffee fed intravenously into our systems. Well, in the misleadingly titled Boris Karloff vehicle "The Man With Nine Lives" (1940), we get to see that such a procedure might be as pleasant as imagined. In this picture, experimental patients of one Dr. Mason, who's looking to cure cancer victims via cryogenics, are brought out of deep freeze in just that manner! Dr. Mason and his nurse fiancée soon discover the body of cryogenics pioneer Dr. Leon Kravaal, 100 feet underground in a Canadian ice cave, where he'd been laying frozen--a corpsicle--for a full decade. Dr. Kravaal (played by Karloff, of course, in still another of his overly ardent scientist roles) is remarkably brought back to life, and begins his scientific pursuits anew. Anyway, this film is a fairly restrained affair, impeccably acted by its small cast, economically written, nicely photographed, and captured here on a pristine-looking DVD. The goateed Kravaal, likable at first, grows increasingly deranged as the film progresses, but still manages to hold the audience's sympathies; a brilliant scientist using unethical methods to achieve great ends. Despite the far-fetched central conceit of the possibility of freezing a man indefinitely and bringing him back to life, the movie is fairly believable; a testament to its intelligent script and fine players. But wait...did I say "far-fetched"? I have a feeling that Walt Disney, Ted Williams and thousands of frozen sperm cells the world over might disagree with that sentiment!