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Such a frustrating disappointment

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Other than watching Mr. Karloff and his wonderful courtroom rant, the rest of this movie just didn't do much for me. Once again the great one is executed and brought back to life. He is able to continue his research and ends up in the basement of a house in a laboratory where a man whose work he envied worked. He decides that instead of continuing to do good, he will get back at those who interrupted his work, mocked him, and sentenced him. After they get to the house, however, everything gets patently silly. He discovers the truth only to have some lunkhead throw his formula into the fire. Instead of flashing the piece of paper around to show the other, he could have kept it in his pocket. Anyway, it rambles on and on and gets nowhere. My favorite thing is this frozen cave where people can be kept. It reminds me of a small refrigerator that I have to defrost about three times a year. I just hate that.

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!

**SPOILERS** Boris Karloff playing a somewhat sympathetic mad doctor, Dr. Leon Kravaal, in this movie still has to pay the ultimate price for his transgressions. Even though in the end his experiments will save the lives of countless terminally ill patients from such horrible and incurable diseases like cancer and muscular scoliosis just to name a few.Having discovered a cure for almost, if not all, every terminal diseases by freezing the person afflicted and then having the cold destroy the infected cells was something that medical science, as well as his colleagues, refused to recognize. They all made Dr. Karvaal into nothing but a fool and charlatan who was just out for the money and publicity. Having disappeared from sight some ten years ago with only his writings, in a little black book, being found at his home on a place called Crater Island. This has Dr. Tim Mason, Roger Pryor, so impressed by what he sees in Dr. Kravaal's book that he continues his experiments with astounding success. But still Dr. Mason needs to have the missing doctor to help him in getting his frozen patients to be successfully defrosted. That in order to make his, and Dr. Kravaal's experiments, a complete success that would be recognized and accepted by the entire medical community.Traveling out to Crater Island with his nurse and fiancée Judy Blair, Jo Ann Sayers, Dr. Mason finds inside the old Kravaal home in a freezer Dr. Kravaal himself frozen stiff after being locked in the freezer for some ten years. Amazingly as Dr. Kravell defrosts he comes back to life! After getting his bearing to being dead, or frozen, for ten years Dr. Kravaal recounts what exactly happened to him. Even more fantastic what happened to the four persons Dr. Bassett, Byron Fougler, Bob Adams, Stanly Brown, D.A John Hawthorne, John Dilson, & Sheriff Stanton, Wally Wales, who were frozen stiff along with him! The four are in the next room, an adjacent, freezer, still alive like himself and waiting to be thawed out.As usual geniuses like Dr. Kravaal are always misunderstood and treated like insane madmen in movies like this. That causes the good doctor to go wacko and end up killing those, Dr. Bassett Roger Adams D.A Hawthorne & Sheriff Stanton, whom his experiments actually not only saved but proved his point. In freezing the death out of people who are on the brink of death which they all were some ten years ago. Young Roger Adams was the most greedy and ridicules of all those whom Dr. Kravaal offed or did in. Roger grabs his formula, that he wrote on a piece of paper, that would keep people alive while frozen and threw it into the fireplace! It then where an enraged Dr. Kravall shot and killed him. Why did Roger do such an insane thing? Because he was now officially dead after being missing for over seven years and not entitle to his uncle Joseph, who's corpse in in the film was played by Lee Willard, millions that he left for him. The ironic part about all this is that Joseph was a patient of Dr. Kravaal who died because of people like Roger who wouldn't let him treat Joseph because they said that he, Dr. Kravall was nuts.It's sad to see that Dr. Kravaal getting shot to death by either the state troopers or Canadian Mounties, it's hard to tell which, at the end of the movie. But he never the less did save Judy, whom Dr. Kravall put into suspended animation, from certain death by freezing her and then bringing her back to life just before him himself expired by having re-discovered the secret formula just before the movie ended when he was killed. In the end Dr. Kravaal in discovering a cure for tens of thousands of person who without it would face certain and agonizing death had been more vindicate for whatever bad that he did in the movie.

THE MAN WITH NINE LIVES is the kind of programmer made on the quick from Columbia studios, not too bad as far as the sets are concerned and with some halfway decent dialog--but nothing disguises the fact that it's not exactly BORIS KARLOFF at his finest. He's a doctor tinkering with the concept of freezing bodies and reviving them later, inadvertently getting frozen in his own freezer and thawed out by a doctor (ROGER PRYOR) and his pretty assistant (JO ANN SAYERS).Most impressive thing about the film is the ice storage areas where the frozen look of the experimental igloos are pretty "cool". But the plot is a simple one of a man willing to be an outlaw in order to prove his scientific theories about reviving the frozen dead.WILLIAM TROWBRIDGE, a dependable B-film actor (who did many an A-film at Warner Bros. and other studios) is the only other recognizable name in the cast--except for a bit appearance by BRUCE BENNETT as a trooper, who is uncredited.Karloff's final experiment does have some value and he passes this on to Pryor and Sawyers so the world can benefit from his knowledge.Summing up: Serves as an okay vehicle for Karloff but fails to have the horror appeal of his best string of films at Universal.