Jack Frost

“He’s chillin…and killin.”

    Growing up, I had access to a world of horror movies. My father and I made a habit of watching four scary movies every weekend – two on Friday night and two on Saturday night before the SNL musical guest came on. I watched more horror films than I even thought existed. For a while, I was really on top of it. I’d seen every new release, every classic, every famous slasher flick, and every B-horror film out there. My repertoire was really good for a thirteen-year-old.

In Junior High, I was introduced to a sub-genre of horror that I never thought I wanted – Christmas Horror. I’m not talking horror movies that happen to take place near Christmas time. I mean killer Santas, monsters that punish naughty children, all that. Every year, my dad would come home with some of the weirdest movies I’d ever heard of. All the titles were terrible Christmas puns like Silent Night Deadly Night and The Gingerdead Man. The movies themselves were – mostly – atrocious. Sometimes they’d prove to be entertaining, but it was the bonding experience that I appreciated the most.

As I got older, my friends would sometimes join us in this late-night movie sessions. It happened that this was the case the night we first watched Jack Frost. We so enjoyed this film that it has become a tradition to reference the movie in casual conversation and to mention it frequently during the holidays. We specifically talked about the world’s worst twist ending that appears. Hilarious memories.

Here’s the thing…I never saw it all the way through. The night we watched it, I gave up and went to bed. This detail is important here because I had these fond, nostalgic memories of this film that were entirely wrong. I was convinced that this movie was something akin to a holiday version of Child’s Play with a criminal selling his soul at his moment of death only to turn into a snowman that kills people. It turns out that it’s much more insane than that.

There’s a beautiful opening. Shots of a Christmas tree are shown with the names of the cast and crew on bobbles will a voiceover of a grandpa telling a kid a bedtime story. The kid asks for a scary story and the grandpa goes all crazy telling him about this murderer named Jack Frost who likes to kill people in gruesome ways. The movie then opens with the real Jack Frost – an angry looking, thirty-something-year-old man – being transported in a van to the place where he will be killed for his crimes. From the conversation between the two orderlies, we find out that Jack Frost has been at large for a long time and that a small-town sheriff happened to find him and take all the glory from the FBI, but it was okay because at least the guy wasn’t going to be around anymore.

Because of the weather, the van crashes with another vehicle transporting some kind of chemical. Everyone survives, but the chemical explodes out of its container and covers Jack Frost, seemingly killing him…except it turns him into a vengeful snowman instead and he kills the orderlies. Maybe…maybe he kills one orderly and the other is just frozen and scared. I don’t remember. Then he sets off, presumably, to the small town where the sheriff who put him away lives.

At this point, I am having trouble writing details about this film even though I just watched it. Most of the things that happen in this movie are so ludicrous that I’m having trouble keeping things straight. We are introduced to the small-town sheriff – his name is Sam – because he and his wife and son (who is insufferably annoying) are driving down the road toward the town and happen upon the van accident. Sam pulls over to ask the policeman what’s going on and tries to explain that he’s a cop. This is how the conversation goes:

Sam: What’s going on here officer? I’m a-

Officer: Move along, this is a matter for the feds.

Sam: Okay.

Sam is so quick to comply and get the hell away from there that I laughed out loud at this part. He certainly respects authority. Okay then. None of his business.

At home, we are introduced to the relationship between Sam and his kid, Ryan. Ryan is an interesting kid. Everything he says sounds like air escaping a balloon… very slowly. He is in the habit of making all these crafts and things for his dad. He even makes him breakfast one morning – some brown glop that looks like poop but is supposed to be oatmeal. Cute. Sam takes it to work in a sandwich bag, but ‘forgets’ to eat it.

Even though he looks about twelve, Ryan seems to see the world through the eyes of a six-year-old and isn’t allowed to know anything about his dad’s work, especially the Jack Frost case. I think it’s around this time we learn that Jack Frost had been sending threats to Sam and his family and Sam is still afraid that he’ll come around, even though he’s totally and most certainly dead.

The movie takes place in a tiny town that loves Christmas and snowman building competitions with the central location being a hardware store whose owner – I will call him the Hardware King – is constantly making up sales for people to buy things. County Sheriff? 20% off. Build a good snowman? 20% off. Walked past the shop on your way home? 20% off. Breathing? 20% off!

Pretty quickly, we get to the action. Sam’s son Ryan is working on a snowman (which has appeared with no context) using a snowman doll as a model to figure out where he should place the carrot. Yep. He needs a model. Anyway, the local bully and his gang come and pick on him. The snowman pushes the bully onto the ground in time for one of the gang to accidentally run over his neck with the blade of his sled. Lovely. After being splattered with blood and watching the whole thing go down, Ryan’s immediate response is to repeat, “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me,” over and over again. Good thing too, because the bully’s father (from now on known as Local Asshole) is convinced he did do it – yes, the twelve-year-old with a snowman doll decapitated a teenager twice his size – and yells at Sam to get his shit together.

There’s a subplot happening. While Sam is looking for who killed the apathetic child – and the body of an old man who was frozen to death with his neck snapped – the FBI comes to help out. It turns out that Jack was blasted with some experimental shit™ that turns living matter into…snow? Or something? Whatever it does, it’s a surprise to the chemical’s creator that Jack can seemingly change molecular form. If he is snow, he can also be ice and water, which means he can basically go anywhere and do anything. The movie then becomes a new X-Men film. Still better than X3.

Some pretty fantastic murders happen in a very short amount of time. A woman’s corpse is mounted on a Christmas tree and wrapped with lights. A girl is frozen into a bathtub in what could be considered the most confusing and tame sexual assault by snowman scene in film history. They are all made better by the puppet hands that are committing all the murders. They are massive and clumsy and look like giant, white mittens. When the snowman’s face is shown, it really only has one expression: mad.

Super mad.  Any time Jack is on screen, he offers some really fantastic, snowman-related puns:

Jack: [attacking someone with an icicle] Listen, I got a point I’d like to make!

Jack: [kills someone with an axe] Gosh. I only axed you for a smoke.

Jack: [I’m] the world’s most pissed-off snow cone!

Jack: [after being hit by a truck] Somebody get the number of that truck!

Jack: [Jack flying through the air] I can see your house from up here!

This man’s entire script was made up of terrible jokes. He doesn’t really say anything of substance. I think this was a good move. I don’t know if I could have handled the writers attempting to make me connect with a killer snowman by giving him well-written lines and making him a well-established character.

I was left with several questions at the conclusion of this film. Many people died. The FBI is coming to figure out what happened to all the people, their officers, and the escaped criminal [SPOILER! He was defeated]. What is Sam’s plan here? How are they going to explain a killer snowman? Are they just going to pretend that nothing happened? Are they going to pretend the other officers never showed up? How will they explain all the bodies? How will they explain that half the population of their town is missing? Will Jack Frost return? Good thing there is a sequel because it will almost definitely answer all of these questions.

Rating:

Fool on the Hill:

It was ridiculous enough that I want to tell everyone about it. It is a movie that will always be in my heart. It is a terrible movie. The plot has many holes, the characters are forgettable, the story is confusing, the visuals are bad, and it’s barely enjoyable to watch. There’s nothing good about this movie except for the puns.

Jack Savage:

While this is one of my favorite films to watch during the holidays, I can’t ignore the bad special effects, horrible one-liners from the title character, and hole-filled plot. However, for the average movie watcher, this will probably be one you can skip over. For our “so bad its good” film lovers, this may be one for your video shelf.

Thomas C:

Jack Frost is one of those films that may be bad, but it knows its bad. My very first viewing of this was only recently. I found the film to be very annoying in the beginning, but the soundtrack, set design, along with some pretty decent acting and good humour turned it a bit for me. I could never say I love this film and I probably won’t watch it again, but when I learned to turn my brain off I found it funny and charming. This is definitely a movie for you and your friends to sit down and riff on, but watch it on your own you may just get frustrated or fall asleep. But then again, I know there is a massive audience of people who love bad films!

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