Boris Karloff worked with director Nick Grinde on three films and was pretty much the same character in each one: a genius scientist persecuted and misunderstood for his unorthodox ideas and who’s so driven in his work that he resorts to criminal acts because of that persecution. They’re essentially good guys who the world just doesn’t understand. In the movies, they’re villians who kill a few people and die in the end, but, like all great movie monsters, we sympathize with them. Often they’re the only character in the film who’s at all interesting.
All of these Nick Grinde-directed Karloff films move at an entertaining gallop and this one is no different. In it, Boris is an eccentric loner scientist who experiments with prolonging life by preserving people in a frozen state. This is supposed to help cure cancer somehow. The family of one of Boris’s patients doesn’t understand what he’s doing though, so they want his creepy ass thrown in jail. The lawmen (and the patient’s nephew) show up to take him away in cuffs, but a scuffle ensues and all of them end up in a preservative deep freeze. Ten years later, they wake up and resume their conflict as if no time had passed when a doctor (Roger Pryor) pokes around the doctor’s old abandoned house for some insight into his mysterious work.
This turns on some plot points that make no sense at all, but the story moves so fast and entertainingly that you don’t really care. I like this a lot. See it.