of the unfamiliar cast is fine, too'. British critic John Hamilton's look at contemporary reviews notes that the Motion Picture Examiner was of the opinion that the film has 'Some moments of horror and some intrigue but the thin and far-fetched plot is drawn out to a length that makes it unwieldy', whilst The New York Times said of the double bill of The Frozen Dead and It!, 'As horror exercises, they are horrible bores'. American film critic Bob Herzberg, in The Third Reich on Screen, 1929-2015, quotes additional contemporary reviews which are in the same vein. He writes that John Mahoney of The Hollywood Reporter called the film 'A murky and dank return to the caverns of the Mad Scientist' with 'sufficient gore' for 'the less discriminating multitudes'. Mandel Herbstman of Film Daily pointed out that 'The excitement at times is high, but so is the credibility gap'. Nonetheless, the movie 'proceeds along formula lines that should create response among the patrons'. And the anonymous reviewer in Variety said, 'In the end, the head cries "Bury me, bury me". Hopefully, this will be the box office response to this project of producer-writer-director' Leder. Among modern-day critics, American academic film historians Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz point out 'the recent trend of mashing up zombies with other literary or cinematic genres. There are numerous films based on genre-crossing gimmicks such as zombies + Nazis' as in The Frozen Dead. But 'There is no immediately self-evident reason why so many texts combine Nazis with zombies, aside from the fact that the Third Reich remains a preferred source of evil in American cinema'. Boluk and Lenz make reference to Canadian critic Glenn Kay, who writes: 'Why so many zombie films return to this subject remains a mystery'. But Herzberg sees such mash-ups as diminutions of historical realities. 'All in all,' he writes, The Frozen Dead continues the growing Nazi/sci-fi subgenre, artfully reducing Nazi atrocities, as well as their ambitions for world conquest, into comic-book schlock, with decapitated heads with special telepathic powers and detached arms which kill, though not necessarily for the Führer, but just for the hell of it'. Hamilton finds that while the film 'starts off promisingly enough' with 'blood-curdling screams and the sight of a thug with a whip leading a party of stumbling wretches chained together', it 'quickly careens downwards and goes from quirky to utterly absurd'. For