Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

***SPOILERS*** Somewhat strange and ridicules story of love and reincarnation that spans something like 100 years with 29 year old former teenage heartthrob Troy Donahue as the mysterious and at the same times freaked out and delusional Ben Gunther. It's Ben who literally runs into-with his motorcycle- pretty and filthy rich Julie Merriday, Joey Heatherton, while zooming along the Pacific Highway at 120 mph. As if it were fate or a sign from heaven Ben realized that Julie and him were lover back in the 1870's who ended up killing themselves-Like Romeo & Juliet- when their parents disapproved of them getting married to each other.At first Julie thinks that Ben is suffering from brain damage due to his accident but in time he proves to her that his crazy statements about him knowing her in a past life are legit. That by providing evidence like photos and trinkets of his romance with Julie 100 years ago when she was actually her own great-great-great grandmother! It's Julie's dad Julian, Barry Sullivan, who sees Ben as a both fraud and gold digger who tries to get Julie to stop seeing him only to have her end up eloping, in Ben's boat,to Mexico with him to get married."""SPOILERS***The truth about Ben's true identity slowly comes to the surface together with two of his victims who he strangled to death and dumped into the Pacific Ocean. With the fact coming out about Ben being an escaped inmate from a hospital for the criminally insane he tries to kidnap Julie only to have the local police as well as Julie's former lover and fiancée Harry Lindsey, Nicolas Coaster, try to rescue her before he does her any harm. In the end it's Ben who does himself in-in knowing that the jig is up- by jumping some 200 feet to his death in order to avoid ending up locked up for life in a mental institution or being strapped into the San Queinton gas chamber for multiple murder.P.S This film -"My Blood Runs Cold"- turned out to be the last major movie that Troy Donahue was to star in before his film career hit rock bottom co-staring in such low budget and forgettable films like "The Cock Fighter" and "The Chilling" before dropping out of sight altogether. Troy in the end ended up broke and homeless sleeping on a park bench in New York City's Central Park and dying of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 65.

I put chiller in quotes, because this is just not thrilling or chilling in any way, It needs to be edited down (almost 2 hours for a thin plot), and the writing and the direction needed to be scaled back -- too much scenery chewing and yelling.But there are some fun compensations.The director, William Conrad, was better known as a radio actor, and the small parts of this movie are filled with veteran radio performers: Jeanette Nolan, Howard McNear, Ben Wright, Barry Sullivan, and even Conrad's voice turns up as the helicopter operator towards the end. If you listen to old radio shows, this is a bit of a treat.The fashions are....well, Jeanette Nolan must be seen to be believed. Her hair is tortured into some demented structure in every scene. One dinner scene has her sporting a tower of hair that Marie Antoinette would have envied. Then there is the part where she has her hair in braids like a coronet, this is the scene where she stays up all night long to make sure that her niece is okay. Bright and early, the next morning, her hair is piled up like a castle battlement with curls and ruffles with an incongruous pony tail sticking straight out the back. When does the woman find the time to do her hair? Does she have a fully staffed beauty salon in her bedroom, or does the long suffering butler (the only servant we ever see) do the hot curler thing in addition to everything else? Her costumes are also flowing caftan like things made of satin. Who really dressed like this? Sorry to go on so much about the clothes and hair, but it was absolutely fascinating, in a bizarre way.

Plot—A polite but obscure young man gains entrée into a wealthy household by claiming he and the family's daughter are reincarnations of past lovers. He's got just enough family secrets to lend some credence to the outlandish claim.For a psychological thriller (why else the title) the film never achieves needed menace. Frankly the role is outside actor Donahue's limited range. Here he comes across more as a blandly mixed up beach boy than anything psychopathic. Thus the narrative unfolds rather than rivets. Heatherton is okay as the object of Gunther's (Donahue) obsession; at the same time, I almost forgot my Gidget flashbacks during the beach scenes. Actually I was most impressed with the unknown Coaster as the buttoned-down attorney, Harry. His sudden turnabout in that showdown scene with Merrivale (Sullivan) is impressive. Harry goes from a passive yes-man to a razor sharp critic in a scene that is both well scripted and acted, and may very well be the film's best.Too bad RKO of the late 40's didn't get the project first. For b&w photography, they would have known what to do with noir material like this. Here the narrative is unfortunately filmed in flat style, at the same time the direction remains largely impassive. Consider what Anthony Mann or John Brahm could have done with, say, the boyish Robert Walker of Strangers on a Train (1951) as Gunther. Perhaps that's not very fair. But considering the potential this film shows, some such comparison is irresistible. Anyway, Donahue's rather sad career again shows the hazards of Hollywood. After all, like many youngsters, his brief moment depended more on youthful good looks than on talent. Too bad he didn't transition into a post-Hollywood career or marriage as many of his peers managed to do. All in all, I prefer to remember him from A Summer Place (1959) rather than for this obscurity.(In passing--The topic of reincarnation briefly seized public attention in 1956 when a Colorado housewife, under hypnosis, claimed to be a reincarnation of an Irish girl, Bridey Murphy, from a century earlier. Apparently, the housewife had the brogue down pat and was just convincing enough to invite serious attention. For a while, many folks were undergoing hypnosis to maybe investigate their own previous lives. Anyway, the fad soon died out, but, for better or worse, I'm reminded of it by this movie.)

Taking over for Sandra Dee as Troy Donahue's blonde vis-a-vis, that outstanding thespian Joey Heatherton is about as exciting as the film's credits. As for Donahue, he tries valiantly as a psychopathic man who may or may not be a re-incarnation of Heatherton's great-great grandmother, but no matter how many convulsions he has, he still lacks the spark to be a sustainable leading man. This story of a so-called family legend has potential, but can't escape the leads, being notable mainly for its romantic supporting actor, Nicolas Coaster, and the wild and wacky hairstyles of Heatherton's aunt, Jeanette Nolan, who seems to have gotten this role because Ruth Gordon wasn't available. Her initial appearance has her in a hat which resembles a pom-pom, and in subsequent scenes, her overly piled coif resembles everything from roadkill to a soufflé. Her performance of a wacky but wise aunt is fun to watch, sort of like that crazy older relative that manages to be dragged out for family holidays whom the younger members enjoy watching get tipsier and tipsier.Unfortunately filmed in black and white (which really doesn't help make this any spookier), that makes much of the dramatic action truly boring, even its climax on a storm-swept lake. Poor Barry Sullivan plays such a beast of a power-throwing patriarch that it is difficult to feel any empathy for him other than the poor material the actor has to speak.A non-Gothic version of a similar story was "A Kiss Before Dying" where Robert Wagner gave a much more convincing portrayal of a psychopath, one you really felt a tinge of sympathy for. Even Robert Walker's psycho in "Strangers on a Train" was more ingratiating and fun to watch than Donahue's here.