The Man with Nine Lives Movie Review

Apparently cinema has been fascinated with cryonics since at least World War II. They even got Boris Karloff to appear in this semi-howler, a pseudoscience story that features some of the worst medical scenes in film history.

Here's the setup: Two researchers (Roger Pryor and Jo Ann Sayers) who have successfully brought a frozen body back to life stumble into an ice-entombed laboratory and find a dude frozen inside. They thaw him out, too, and when he pops back to life he turns out to be Dr. Leon Kravaal (Karloff), who's been missing for a decade after getting frozen by his own experiment. Now that he's back to the warm-blooded, Kravaal begins his experiments again, starting with those who oppose him and ending with those who saved his life!

Well, you probably saw that coming, but you can't help but giggle at the method our researchers use to revive the frozen: Hot coffee, delivered via a funnel and tube connected somewhere on the patient we can't really see. "Give me some more hot coffee." It's delivered with the severity of something you'd see on ER these days and only half the stupidity.

At first curiously intriguing, The Man with Nine Lives eventually becomes so silly that it's hard to take much of it -- if any of it -- seriously.