Siskel and Ebert called this comedy “the worst film ever made” – but Dave finds some genuine humour among the toe-curling cringe.

“It’s as depressing an experience as I’ve ever had going to the movies,” sighed a weary Gene Siskel to a nodding Roger Ebert on their syndicated movie review show. “And that’s after twenty-three years of doing it professionally, and maybe six or seven-thousand pictures.”

The Statler and Waldorf of film criticism could make or break a film in three minutes flat, and their assassination of FROZEN ASSETS ensured that George Miller’s $5million lark recouped less than ten percent of its budget during a fleeting theatrical run. Clearly, the world just wasn’t ready for a semen-stained comedy with Diane from Cheers.

The sitcom darling plays Dr. Grace Murdock: an idealistic biologist who runs a small-town sperm bank in Oregon. It’s a loss maker in terms of revenue, though, so with an eye on a big promotion, corporate yuppie Zach Shepard (Corbin Bernsen) is tasked with lifting it out of the mire. His plan? A Stud of the Year contest to enable him to fulfil an order for five-thousand vials of spunk, and a $100k prize for the man with the highest concentration of tadpoles.

Based upon the synopsis alone, it’d be fair to say that Frozen Assets’ chances were always slim. It all began in rather inauspicious circumstances too…

Once the film wrapped in August 1991, the first opportunity to pitch it to distributors came the following March at the American Film Market. Keen to drum up publicity, one of the producers hit upon the idea of inserting Frozen Assets branded condoms inside copies of trade paper Motion Pictures International. Alas, things quickly went pear-shaped (or, more accurately, phallus-shaped) when the rubbers began to fall out of the industry mags and started to litter the floor of the AFM, much to the horror of the organisers.

Unperturbed by this spectacular marketing failure, the Frozen Assets team hatched another publicity-seeking scheme ahead of the movie’s October ’92 release. This time it virtually echoed the plot of the film: a Stud of the Year competition was held in partnership with a Californian sperm bank; a celebrity judging panel was commissioned; and the man with the highest sperm count would win an all-expenses trip to Mexico.

Moral ambiguity aside, neither of the wacky schemes did anything to swell the potential audience for Miller’s film. Following its brief cinema stay, Frozen Assets hit video in America in June ’93 via Fox. It bypassed U.K. cinemas altogether and rocked up at rental stores that October through 20:20 Vision.

Is the film that bad?

No, absolutely not.

Granted, it is an exercise in bad taste, and I’d be tempted to file it alongside Garry Marshall’s Exit to Eden (1994) as one of those comedies where the viewing of it is markedly less painful than reading the synopsis because there are genuine laughs to be found.  

A good portion of scripters Don Klein and Tom Kartozian’s one-liners land. Larry Miller’s quirky philanthropist is a riot; Gerrit Graham’s tight-ass cameo is a hoot; and both Bernsen and Long are a delight together. They’re seasoned pros, and they must have known by day two that they’d signed on for a box office bomb. Nevertheless, they squeeze every remnant of comedy they can from the material (“You know why this place doesn’t do any business? I’ve known you for five seconds and already I want a vasectomy!”) and you have to admire that.

USA ● 1992 ● Comedy ● 91mins

Shelley Long, Corbin Bernsen, Larry Miller, Gerrit Graham ● Dir. George T. Miller ● Wri. Don Klein, Tom Kartozian