Jack Frost (

1997

)

Wes Craven has a lot to answer for. Sure, when he made Scream (1996), it was hardly the first comedic meta-slasher, as Saturday the 14th (1981) shows, deconstructions of the slasher genre are nearly as old as the genre itself! But unlike Saturday the 14th (1981), or Student Bodies (1981) or Evil Dead 2 (1987), Scream (1996) had a massive impact on normal, non-parodic horror movies. Suddenly, the cinemas were awash in crappy “self-aware” slashers that focused more on getting laughs than scaring their audience. A filmmaker of Craven caliber can pull off the tight rope act of balancing horror and laughter, but most of those trying to imitate Scream (1996) were decidedly less up to the task. Case in point: today’s film, the work of first-time director Michael Cooney.

We open with two impossibly annoying disembodied voices, one trying too hard to sound scary and intimidating and one trying too hard to sound like a little girl. Think Ozzy Osborn guest-starring on an episode of the Muppets. These two fill us in on the backstory, such as it is. You see, not that long ago a notorious serial killer named Jack Frost was captured by a small-town sheriff named Sam Tiler. Frost was sentenced to execution, and that should be the end of the story, but as the trying way too hard to be scary voice insists, the tale is only just beginning. The ensuing credit screen, which works the names of the cast and crew into a series of Christmas ornaments is tolerably enjoyable. Keep in mind, I watch roughly 100 movies a year whose credit sequence is “a man driving with white text overlay” so by this point I’m pretty easy to please in this department.

From there we cut to the prison convoy transporting Frost to the site of his execution. It seems a bit odd to me, I always assumed that condemned criminals were generally housed in the same facility where they are going to be executed. Even if that’s the case, this is the level of plot-hole I’m more than willing to accept from a movie about a killer snowman. Despite the ludicrous level of security on Frost’s transport, he has an armed guard sitting next to him at all times, he still manages to escape (of course) by engineering a car crash. The only problem is that in all the excitement of the getaway, Frost accidentally knocks a tanker off the road, as chance would have it this tanker is carrying an experimental chemical, that promptly dissolves him.

Of course, this doesn’t kill him and Jack Forts comes back as a sentient killer snowman and makes a B-line for Sheriff Sam Tiler and his town. Amusingly, he looks a bit like the stop-motion characters that would show up in the old Christmas TV specials. Now, being a snowman comes with a few advantages. Jack can melt himself into a puddle, slip under the doorway, and then solidify himself in somebody’s house. He’s also effectively invincible, being able to shrug off shotgun shells like they were a stiff breeze. Being melted slows him down a bit more (meaning a hairdryer is a pretty effective weapon against him), but it’s never long before he reforms, relocates his coal eyes and carrot nose, and comes back for more. Frost is also strangely ok with being turned into a snowman, accepting the fact and getting on with his life in shockingly quick fashion. Seriously, I’ve been more upset about bad weather than this guy is about becoming a human popsicle. I’ll chalk it up to Frost’s can-do attitude. Shame that he only applies that positive thinking to murder. Indeed, Frost relishes his new snowman body so much that he immediately sets out on a murder spree to acquire the cliché accessories like the corn-cob pipe and the classic red scarf.

It’s at this point that the main problem with Jack Frost starts to become apparent: I just don’t find these people annoying enough to laugh at their deaths. In a straight horror film, you can have sympathetic characters be killed in all sorts of disgusting ways. That’s part and parcel of the whole horror genre. However, despite numerous fear-mongering media studies, horror fans are not sadists who enjoy watching people get gutted and hung out on meat hooks. There is nothing innately funny about violence for any normal person. Making a death seem comedic takes either a light touch (al la The Trouble with Harry (1955)) or an absurdly heavy one (see Dead Alive (1992)). For normal people to find gore funny it needs to either be understated or so absurdly cartoonish that it ceases to resemble reality. Jack Frost does not understand this at all, and instead gives us normal slasher film killings made comedic by the inclusion of some vaguely yule-tide soundtrack. Nor does Jack Frost understand the classic trick of making the victims intolerable assholes, to make their deaths and mutilations more plateable to the audience. Far from hating Mrs. Metzner, I found myself pitying the poor woman before and during her murder. Compare this with the masterful opening sequence of Santa’s Slay (2005) were we are given plenty of time to hate the odious family before our killer Santa cuts a bloody swath through them and you’ll immediately appreciate the difference. A bit more characterization would go a long way. Oh, then there’s the “comic” rape scene, where Jack Frost violates a teenage girl with his carrot nose. Certainly, sexual violence can and has been an element of horror films for decades, but turning it into a joke (complete with “Christmas comes early this year” pun at the end) seems tasteless even to me. Sure, it’s pretty tasteless to laugh at murder but at least the victims of murder aren’t around to see it.

The company that made the chemical Frost was bathed in is aware that maybe the spill will have some negative consequences. So, they dispatch FBI agent Manners and a bureaucrat by the name of Stone to clean it up. Weirdly enough they have no idea what exposure to the chemical would do. They haven’t even tested the stuff on an amoeba yet and were obviously years away from any human trials. This makes me wonder why they need to ship a tanker full of the stuff cross-country, isn’t it standard procedure to experiment with smaller quantities. Again this is the kind of plot hole I’m willing to accept from a movie about a killer snowman, but all these little defects are starting to add up. The men dispatched by the company are straight out of the classic 1990s “don’t trust the man, man” mentality and are consequently both secretive, arrogant, and in hopelessly over their heads. Naturally, the brunt of the work in stopping Frost’s rampage is going to fall to Sheriff Tiler and his deputies. Fortunately for them, despite Jack’s snow body, he does have one crucial weakness: antifreeze.

Jack Frost falls into the same trap a lot of crappy horror-comedies fall into: It’s neither very horrific not very funny. The pitiful stabs at comedy become just a crutch for the film to hide its numerous shortcomings behind. Were the movie legitimately funny or legitimately scary I could forgive the tonal inconsistency but it is neither. The whole thing just reeks of laziness and incompetence, and spoils any fun I might have had with what is admittedly a pretty amusing premise. If I can’t believe that at least the filmmaker was fully invested in his work, then there’s no way I’m going to be fully invested in it. It’s a shame because I for one am sick of killer Santa Clauses and was ready to see a Christmas horror movie that mixed up the formula a bit with something other than a murderous mall Santa. Jack Frost is just a massive pile of shit. Seriously, the only redeeming thing about this turd is very probable confusion it caused parents in the late 1990s. I wonder, how many sheltered kids were emotionally scarred when their parents mistook it for the sappy 1998 Michael Keaton vehicle.