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Dr. Tim Mason, a brilliant young scientist, has been experimenting with cryogenics using theories propounded by Dr. Leon Kravaal, who mysteriously disappeared ten years earlier.  When the press publicizes Tim's research, the public believes that he has discovered a cure for cancer, and the hospital in which he works is inundated with desperate pleas for help from cancer patients.  As a result, the hospital sends the young doctor away until the publicity dies down.

Accompanied by his fiancée, nurse Judith Blair, Tim sets out for the Canadian border and hires a boat from Pete Daggett to take him to Crater Island, from which Kravaal disappeared.  In Kravaal's home, Blair falls through the floor boards and discovers a secret passage that leads to a room with a temperature of one hundred degrees below zero.  There Blair and Tim find Kravaal's frozen body.

Once revived, Kravaal tells Tim that ten years before a party of four, including Sheriff Stanton, District Attorney John Hawthorne, Bob Adams and Dr. Bassett, came to arrest him because they believed he had killed Bob's uncle, Jasper Adams, and that during the arrest they all became trapped in the ice room.  Tim and Kravaal begin to revive the four men, but when Bob Adams learns that he cannot collect on his uncle's life insurance because he has been legally dead for ten years, he destroys the delicate thawing formula.  Kravaal then insists on using the three remaining frozen men in an experiment designed to reconstruct his success.

After Kravaal shoots and kills Adams, Stanton is killed while attempting an escape, and Hawthorne and Dr. Bassett die from the effects of the experiments.  Just as Kravaal is about to experiment on Judith, a search party led by Daggett arrives, and the demented scientist is killed.