1996, United States. Starring Scott MacDonald, Christopher Allport, Stephen Mendel, F. William Parker, Eileen Seeley, Rob LaBelle, Zack Eginton, Jack Lindine, Kelly Jean Peters, Marsha Clark, Chip Heller, Brian Leckner, Darren Campbell, Shannon Elizabeth Fabal, Paul Keith. Directed by Michael Cooney. Buy it from Amazon.

Why oh why do I do the horrible things I do? Not long after watching this film, I posted a lament on alt.horror, bemoaning the sacrifices people like myself make for your benefit. You don't know the pain; you can't understand the suffering. You don't know what it's like to sit and scrutinize all four Leprechaun films. I wanted to share my pain with you, the web surfer. That's why I write these reviews; that's why I do this website. It's not because I love you or want to be loved by you. It's because I cannot control my urge to watch the most atrocious, painful films ever made, and deep down I want to inflict that same pain on you.

Jack Frost is not the most painful movie experience of my life. On the scale of pain, Jack Frost clocks in at about the same level as, oh, let's say a spinal tap. I would imagine this Jack Frost is actually a lot less painful than the more recent mainstream Jack Frost, in which Michael Keaton rips off this movie and the lame-ass movie Fluke. Fluke was this annoying heartfelt Christmas film about a father who is killed in a car wreck one snowy night and resurrected as his son's dog. Jack Frost starring Michael Keaton was the same exact thing, only he got put in a snowman's body.

I take no small degree of delight in thinking that somewhere out there, people are picking up this Jack Frost and thinking it is the Michael Keaton Jack Frost. With any luck, these people are parents who will also go, "Oh look at this cute muppet movie!' and also rent Meet the Feebles.

So Jack Frost. What we have here is a movie that thought it was clever and witty. That thought, not surprisingly, was wrong.

The movie begins with a "chilling Christmas story," voiced over the credits. An adult pretends to be a child by talking in a stupid squeaky voice and mispronouncing things. Like when she squeals "Pweeeeze!" Her uncle or some crazy-ass old fart tells her a story about Jack Frost, the serial killer who slaughtered 38 people before finally getting caught. And oh my -- on this very night, he is being executed.

Cut to the "Executional Transfer Vehicle." Now I may not be well versed in the America prison system, but I could have sworn that they usually kept the death row prisoners in a prison with a death row. And I know that when transporting a convicted mass murderer, they would probably have more than one old guard with him. I mean, Hannibal Lector -- they strapped his ass to a dolly and put that funny mask on him. Jack Frost, America's deadliest serial killer of all time, is handcuffed and stuck in the back of an ice cream truck with a retired member of the Mayberry police force.

As if this situation wasn't volatile enough, the "death row inmate delivery truck" isn't the only delivery truck out on this stormy night. No, the "Genetic Engineering Delivery Truck" is also out. Call me crazy, but you'd think they would, I don't know, postpone both the transfer of America's deadliest killer and a truckload of unstable genetic engineering crap until after the big blizzard. I guess that's why I'm not a prison warden or a genetic engineer, though. I just can't make the tough calls.

In a shocking twist, these two trucks collide. I can see the scene now:

"You got genetic mutation juice in my serial killer!"

"You got serial killer in my genetic mutation juice."

Yes, two great tastes that resulted in Jack Frost. The genetic stuff makes Jack combine with the snow around him. He comes out looking like a styrofoam snowman. I don't know if this is what the engineers had in mind, that they could bond people with snow. It seems like a pretty strange avenue for research. But then, someone did spend millions of dollars on a study to see why women in abusive relationships are more depressed and likely to commit suicide than women in stable and loving relationships. Science knows no bounds.

It doesn't take long for Jack Frost to waddle his snowy ass into the town where he got caught and start zinging us with those wacky murder one-liners we all know and love. Only, this time, it's a snowman. There's something intensely not scary about a snowman. I mean, sure, maybe if this was the Kalahari Desert and I was a bushman, and a snowman came running at me, that would probably be pretty shocking. But as it stands, a snowman is a hard thing for me to be terrified beyond belief by.

Of course, the snowman can't just waffle people to death with his broom. He has to engage in the horror film tradition of "wacky death." The first murder occurs when a group of sled bullies -- yes they are a gang of tough young punks who bully others on the sled hills -- make fun of the snowman. Out of nowhere, the snowman has arms and knocks one of the bullies in front of a fast approaching sled. This sled, which looked like standard K-Mart issue, apparently had rockets on the back and samurai sword blades on the bottom, because it cleanly severs the bully's head. Having grown up in Kentucky, I did my fair share of sledding, and I've been hit by my fair share of sleds. Never once was I decapitated, no matter how well waxed the sled blades were. They were still blunt, flat pieces of metal.

There's so many things wrong with this whole scene. I mean, for one, there's the menacing snowman thing, but we're beyond that by now. So we have sled bullies. Really? A gang of guys who like to sled down hills and don't let no other punk stand in their way. Seriously, do these gangs exist? Having lived in Florida and now in New York, I thought I'd heard of every type of gang. Latin Killers. Born to Kill. Vicious gangs of sled riders are a new one on me.

And then there's the fact that this giant snowman leaps to life and attacks a kid, and only one kid seems to notice. And where the heck did those arms come from?

In all fairness, I must mention that the snowman leaping to life isn't actually shown. You see, that would require a special effect. Instead, it's just some jumpy editing, we see the big snowy arm, and that's about it. In fact, through almost the whole movie, Jack Frost does nothing but sit there. I mean, they didn't even fork over the cash for a decent puppet mouth so it would look more like he was talking.

"Wacky killing" is soon joined by the other horror film staple, the post-murder one-liner. This trend in horror began with Freddy but was actually honed by Arnold Swartzenegger in the action genre. The action genre gave birth to it, as the earliest examples I can find of the post-kill one-liner are in James Bond films. Since then, America has been unable to produce a script without having the hero or villain hurl a sly one-liner after he's killed someone. My favorite will always be, "Let off some steam, Bennet!" from the Swartzenegger film, Commando. At best they are a mild but amusing annoyance. At worst, they don't even have very much to do with the killing.

Guess which end of the spectrum the quips in Jack Frost come from!

In one scene, Jack tries to posses someone by melting himself down to water (he has that power) and going inside them. When it doesn't work too well, Jack spews himself out the guy's mouth then proclaims, "Don't eat the yellow snow!"

It's good advice and all, but what does it have to do with that whole scene?

Anyway, Jack's murderous rampage continues. He puts an ax down some guy's throat, and then he turns an old lady into a Christmas ornament of bloody horror. The big pay-off comes when the snowman gets to have sex with a regular human woman.

Yes indeed. He takes that carrot nose of his and, well, you figure it out. It's pretty sick and tasteless. I mean, it is a snowman having sex, so there's some entertainment value there. But raping a teenager with a carrot nose a snowman has affixed to his lower abdominal region is, well ... you know, for some reason, if Joe D'Amato had come up with this, it would have been fine. Anyway, the snowman has sex. Go figure that shit out.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The local sheriff is on the case, and he is frustrated by those uptight city slicker FBI agents who look down on small town folk. This is the source of much hilarity. And Jack Frost can shoot icicles.

In the end, they discover the only way to defeat the killer snowman is with anti-freeze. Get it? Because he is frozen. See?

This has been an epic review, but a film this mind-bendingly bad deserves this much space. I mean, this movie got made. Those of you in film class take note. Your professor will tell you how hard it is to sell a script. Don't listen to him. Just send your script to A-Pix and Full Moon Productions. You can even just send them the gist of it written out on a napkin. They will make your movie.

I've actually had worse experiences than Jack Frost, but that doesn't mean I want to repeat it. Despite the hilarious sounding premise and that snowman sex scene, the movie is mostly just badly acted, boring filler. Nothing is very funny and the suspense and terror are actually in the negative range. Not that it was ever supposed to be. My lament about how a snowman is not scary was not a fact lost on the makers of this film. They obviously had tongue in cheek (read the end credits very carefully -- they're the best part of the film, and not just because it means the film is over). It just didn't work out very well. Instead of "clever," it's more like a script written by three college-age horror fans who had too much to drink. And that's probably exactly what it was.

And yet, and I can't prevent myself from suggesting that you at least consider watching this film. It's awful, but god damnit, a snowman kills people and has sex. That's got to be worth something.

Labels: Horror: Just Plain Weird, Horror: Slashers, Year: 1996