To begin, I must apologize for the way I ended yesterday's review. I'm not sure exactly what it was about A Wish For Christmas that soured me so greatly. It wasn't the worst example of a holiday movie I've ever seen. It wasn't even the worst holiday movie I've seen so far this year, not even close. But the experience of watching the movie just gnawed at me for a few hours before I started trying to actually even review it, and every time I thought about the movie, I came to despise it a little more. By the time I sat down to write the review, I had such a hard time saying absolutely anything coherent about the movie that I almost chose to just skip the review entirely. I finally forced myself to start typing, and, well, you know the rest.
A Wish For Christmas isn't really a bad movie, but it was bad for me, if that means anything. However, I was so distracted in my disdain for the movie in yesterday's post that I neglected to even mention my biggest pet peeve with the entire experience, which I must briefly mention now, because I need to vent, and it would just be weird to insert this topic into some random post later on down the line.
Actress Lacey Chabert was very pregnant while filming A Wish For Christmas, but the character she played was not pregnant, so the production had to bend over backwards to hide her swollen belly throughout the movie with a series of big coats, over-sized dresses, uncomfortably tight medium camera shots with any actors sharing the frame with Lacey, and the tried and true classic trick of just putting stuff in front of the offending baby bump, no matter how awkward it may look in the final film. Lacey Chabert is always holding something in front of her belly in this movie, be it a winter coat, her purse, a book, a manila envelope, a knit cap clenched between her nervous fingers, etc.
The moment you notice this phenomenon, that's all you'll ever see. Nothing else really registers aside from this. Your eyes are glued to this constant distraction in shot after shot, and it creates a barrier between you and the narrative. How the hell are you supposed to pay attention to anything else when this neurotic woman is always awkwardly holding random items over her torso for no immediately discernible reason? Hell, maybe that was what really set me off yesterday. I couldn't really judge the movie because I was too distracted by all the weird hand stuff Lacey Chabert was doing to hide her pregnancy to judge the story on its own merits. Eh, it's not like A Wish For Christmas was some maligned masterpiece, anyway. The movie can still go straight to Hell.
Either way, something needed to change today. I needed a break from the same old crap, and so I decided to spend my morning reacquainting myself with Jack Frost. Not 1998's Jack Frost with Michael Keaton, the one about the dead dad who comes back as a snowman to spend a little quality time with his sad sack son around Christmastime. No, I'm talking about 1997's Jack Frost, AKA Jack Frost: Attack Of The Mutant Killer Snowman, the one about a... mutant killer snowman.
Today's Feature: Jack Frost
Serial killer Jack Frost is genetically mutated in a car wreck en route to his execution, becoming a mutant killer snowman hell-bent on exacting vengeance upon the small town sheriff who brought him to justice.
If you've never seen Jack Frost, that's cool. A lot of people haven't. But it was a pretty big deal back in its day, however, much to the surprise of the film's director, Michael Cooney, who expected the film to be roundly ignored as it was released direct-to-video back in the winter of 1997. But distributor A-Pix Entertainment had a solid distribution deal with Blockbuster Video which landed the title prominently on store shelves all across the United States, and the lenticular cover designed for the video box, featuring a kindly snowman's face transforming into a fanged monstrosity, was a real eye-catcher for consumers, who often rented the title out of sheer morbid curiosity after noticing the kitschy morphing cover while browsing for the latest, often already checked-out big studio releases.
So Jack Frost, the little movie that could, became a surprise success, even spawning an eventual sequel, 2000's Jack Frost 2: Revenge Of The Mutant Killer Snowman, which honestly wasn't nearly as good. How could it have been? Jack Frost came completely out of nowhere, seemingly materializing out of thin air on video store shelves overnight, this bizarre, perfectly ridiculous low budget exercise in absurdity. The original film was something that, by all rights, shouldn't have worked on any level, but it has this scummy underdog charm that is difficult to accurately describe, something that happens organically and not very often. The sequel was a case of trying too hard to recapture that same preposterous magic, and it just feels like a poor imitation of the original.
But I'm not here to talk about the unappealing sequel, so let's get on with the discussion.
Jack Frost takes place in the fictional town of Snomonton, Colorado, the snowman capital of the Midwest, and notorious serial killer Jack Frost is traveling to town en route to his own execution at the state penitentiary in the middle of a severe blizzard. Before Frost can be delivered to his own damnation, the prisoner transport collides head-on with a truck shipping an unstable experimental chemical compound that bonds human DNA with inert organic substances that was developed by a mad scientist as a means of preserving mankind's genetic structure in the case of an extinction-level event, hoping that some alien civilization would eventually discover this genetic ark and use it to resurrect the human race in the distant future. That's a pretty ambitious plan for a mad scientist in such a low-budget motion picture.
Exposed to the volatile chemicals in the crash, Jack Frost falls into a snowdrift and melts, becoming one with the molecular structure of the snow itself. The dazed driver of the prisoner transport watches this all happen, and promptly goes barking mad, reverting to a blubbering, child-like state when he is discovered by the state police. And Jack Frost is M.I.A., having become an unstoppable snow monster, making his way to Snomonton (it's slow going considering his new snowman body doesn't have legs) on a mission of vengeance against the town's sheriff, some middle-aged sap who found himself in the right place at the right time a few years earlier, happening upon Jack Frost as the killer was taking a leak on the side of the road while passing through town.
Apprehending Frost has made the sheriff, Sam, something of a local celebrity, but he doesn't want anything to with fame. He just wants to put all of the madness behind him and get back to business as usual in sleepy little Snomonton, and he believes that the execution of Jack Frost will allow him to do just that. Little does Sam know that the mad killer has now become a demented elemental abomination with a chilly axe to grind against him and the people of the community he loves.
That's the basic set-up for Jack Frost, and aside from the wacky "genetic chemicals" plot device, that doesn't necessarily sound like a recipe for laughter. And there's a good reason for that: Michael Cooney's original screenplay was not a comedy, but an ambitious effects-driven thriller that would have cost an absurd amount of money to produce. Coming to terms with the fact that nobody was going to give a first-time twenty-something director a massive budget to make a movie about a serial killer snowman, he pared down the effects set pieces bit by bit, until he finally had a story he could produce for a more reasonable sum.
Unfortunately, the financiers he eventually secured weren't willing to pony up more than a million bucks to bring his vision to life, so Cooney had to trim the screenplay a little more, then a little more, but at least he finally had the go-ahead to make his dream of directing an actual movie on actual film a horrifying reality. At this point, the story was still a straight-forward thriller, without any of the real tongue-in-cheek elements that the final movie would hold in abundance. So why did the story change so drastically from the original screenplay to the finished motion picture? What happened?
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| This happened. |
Just look at that guy. He's the reason Jack Frost became a cult classic, and not some forgotten footnote in an out-of-print horror trivia book. The production only had the budget for one full-sized snowman puppet, and director Cooney had to trust an effects company he had never heard of to bring that puppet to life, due to their ties to the producers. And that was what they delivered a few scant weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin.
The puppet was barely articulated, a full foot shorter than ordered, and resembled a natural snowman about as much as Fox News resembles a real news network. Michael Cooney took one look at this abomination and realized he was screwed. Nobody would ever accept that puppet as a credible threat in a motion picture, but he didn't have the time or money to commission a new puppet from a rival effects company, and the group that had made this pathetic puppet was already working on an additional animatronic head for close-ups based on the same design, so Cooney was stuck with the goofiest foam snowman puppet ever conceived in the motion picture industry.
So Michael Cooney, realizing his screenplay in its current form was no longer viable due to this new development, holed up in a hotel room for a few days and reworked his story from top to bottom, transforming his horror-thriller into a horror-comedy in a fit of creative desperation. Cooney's new self-imposed mandate to refuse to take the story seriously invigorated the troubled production, with the cast and crew quickly falling in line behind this first-time director's new authorial vision, because the puppet wasn't the only problem they were facing.
Most people who watch Jack Frost assume the film was shot in the middle of the summer, but it was actually produced in early winter in the Big Bear Lake area of San Bernardino County, California. Weather forecasts promised cold weather and lots of snow, and Cooney was fully prepared to utilize his locations to the fullest, planning sweeping camera shots over white-capped mountains and elaborate sequences of characters outrunning the eponymous killer snowman on toboggans rushing down snowy hilltops. But the weather patterns abruptly shifted, and instead of snow the area was beset by unseasonably warm temperatures, so no genuine snow ever materialized, and they didn't have enough money to purchase enough fake snow to convincingly blanket their exterior locations.
That's why you'll notice a distinct lack of snow throughout the movie, as well as a lack of sweeping camera shots depicting any snowy wilderness. The production was so cash-strapped that aside from enough shredded foam to produce a few large piles of fake snow to shift around every exterior location, most backgrounds are entirely bereft of the white stuff entirely. A few brief shots will linger just a little too long, allowing even an untrained eye to notice the blankets of snow nestled around trees in certain backgrounds are actual white blankets. But this layer of artifice actually works in the movie's favor, because nothing feels real and it's not supposed to feel real. It's really part of Jack Frost's threadbare charm.
And of course the film's opening titles sequence sets the tone perfectly, with the camera gliding over a series of hand-painted ornaments depicting the names of the cast and crew, hanging on a festively lit Christmas tree as an exasperated, unseen narrator (Michael Cooney himself) regales his annoying daughter with the gory tale of Jack Frost's multi-state killing spree, the daughter growing more audibly frightened as the story becomes more and more graphic in its depictions of heads bashed open and great gouts of blood spilling forth, etc. The sequence kills two birds with one stone, filling the audience in on the story of Jack Frost thus far while letting them all know that the movie they're about to watch should not be mistaken for a serious motion picture.
Jack Frost is a nonsensical romp through a small town besieged by a murderous snowman. Doesn't that just sound great? Who doesn't want to watch that kind of movie? You come to see the dumbest-looking snowman puppet anyone has ever designed stalk and kill a bunch of hapless folks in increasingly ridiculous styles, and the movie certainly delivers on that front. Starting with just one family, we've got a teenaged bully getting decapitated with an errant sled, his distraught mother force-fed a bunch of glass ornaments and strung up in her family Christmas tree, her abusive husband dispatched with an axe handle down his throat, and the older daughter... raped to death by the horny snowman in a bathtub.
Yeah. You know that scene, right? I've mentioned it before in passing. Shannon Elizabeth, in her first on-screen performance, breaks into the sheriff's house with her delinquent boyfriend to hang out, drink some stolen wine, and fornicate like a pair of dirty sinners in front of somebody else's roaring fireplace. Elizabeth's character comes up with the excuse that she's broken-hearted over her asshole younger brother's death and shouldn't be expected to act rationally in her time of grief, but she just wanted to knock boots in the sheriff's house, and everybody knows it. While she's upstairs blow-drying her hair, the boyfriend gets knocked off in the kitchen by Jack Frost's killer icicles.
Noticing an already-drawn bath, she inexplicably decides that after just drying her hair she should climb in the tub and get wet all over again, which is weird enough, because I know all about women and their hair. Am I right, men? C'mon, you know it's true! Anyway, the warm bathwater, as you may have guessed, is actually Jack Frost playing possum, because he can alter his form at will between ice, snow, water, or steam, and he quickly coalesces around the ill-fated future protagonist of Catch A Christmas Star, trapping her screaming, flailing body in his snowy depths while he repeatedly slams her against a wall until she finally expires, left to rot on the slippery bathroom floor.
As originally conceived and shot, Shannon Elizabeth's character was never meant to be killed via killer snowman sex. The puppet was supposed to just slam the actress against the wall repeatedly until the impact fractured her skull and killed her. But Cooney noticed while watching the dailies that the snowman puppet clearly looked like it was having very rough sex with the hapless young woman instead of just bashing her head against the tile wall, and that audiences would probably only interpret the scene in that one, unintentionally provocative manner. So once again, he made lemonade out of lemons by adding in some cackling voice-over from Jack Frost (veteran character actor Scott MacDonald) during the scene making the implied rape explicit, and a quick insert shot of the puppet standing in front of the mirror after the act, smoking a pipe and exclaiming "Christmas just came early this year".
Yeah, it's a rape scene. It's the primary reason why this movie is still remembered today. This is a controversial thing, and that controversy generated more and more rental revenue for the film, especially after Shannon Elizabeth's star-making turn in American Pie, when a bunch of curious nerds inevitably rented Jack Frost after the fact because it was the infamous movie where she got raped to death by an evil snowman. That's fucking crazy. A movie exists wherein a woman gets raped to death by an evil snowman. And it's a comedy. I first saw this movie in 1998, when I rented it on a quiet Tuesday evening, completely unsuspecting that the bizarre-looking videotape I was bringing home would feature a scene in which a terrified young woman would be, and I have to type it again because I still can't believe it's real, raped to death by a murderous snowman.
Say what you will about this scene from a moral standpoint, but that's some fucking exploitation gold, right there.
During the film's climax, Sheriff Sam horrifically wounds the seemingly unkillable Jack Frost with oatmeal while fighting the evil snowman in his squad car. Why does oatmeal work on this invincible killing machine when seemingly nothing else does? Anti-freeze. There's anti-freeze in the oatmeal. Why is there anti-freeze in the oatmeal? Because his goofy son put it in there. He made his hero daddy a special batch of chocolate-and-marshmallow oatmeal for breakfast that day, and Sam collected it in a bag and promised his slow-witted son that he'd eat it for lunch at the station, but he just left it in his car because it looked like a bag of feces and he wasn't going to sully his tastebuds with that stuff.
It's a good thing he left the oatmeal in his car, too, otherwise Jack Frost would have dispatched his nemesis with relative ease, but why did if have anti-freeze in it? Sam asks his son what was so special about the oatmeal immediately after he uses it to wound the evil snowman, and the kid admits that he added anti-freeze as a special ingredient, because he didn't want his daddy to get too cold at work. He profusely apologizes while admitting this, so he obviously knows that anti-freeze is not suitable for human consumption, so was he trying to kill his father? The movie never answers this question, but the killer oatmeal does give Sam the idea to convert a resident's pick-up truck into a toxic redneck swimming pool, filling it with anti-freeze and then body slamming Jack Frost through a second-floor window into the viscous fluid, sealing the psychotic snowman's fate, so thanks for being such a creepy enigma, kid. Your devious attempt to knock off your father saved the day.
Jack Frost is an inventive, hilarious curiosity of a horror-comedy, and I just love it to death. I watched the film this morning in high definition thanks to the mad geniuses at Vinegar Syndrome who recently released it on Blu-Ray for the holidays, and I am forever grateful to them for treating such an unlikely title with such care. I guess maybe I'm not done with Schlock-Mas, after all. Tomorrow I shall return.
VERDICT: NAUGHTY (IN THE NICEST WAY)
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