Oftentimes filmmakers attempt to ignore the perimeters set by their budgets, the consequences often being an overextended work which, if the powers-that-be would have conscientiously acknowledged their limitations, would have otherwise resulted in a very capable, satisfactory effort. As such, say what you will about a bawdy premise involving a serial killing snowman, Jack Frost possesses an astute–albeit very wry–wit, a sensibility which the film’s screenwriter/director, Michael Cooney, would later hone in the creation of the script for James Mangold’s postmodern psychological thriller, Identity. It is with such cinematic acumen that Cooney wisely utilizes what little finances he was granted to create a readily enjoyable, excessively fun, Christmas horror comedy unlike any other.
After a five year killing spree, which spanned eleven states and claimed thirty-eight lives, Snomoton sheriff Sam Tiler (Christopher Allport) apprehends the homicidal Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald). Years later, while in transit to be executed–due to haggard road conditions–the killer is involved in an automobile accident in which he is doused with experimental chemicals. As a consequence of having genetically bonded with the surrounding snow banks, Frost mutates into a snowman who is able to alter his DNA at will. True to his word, he returns to Snomoton in order to seek his revenge upon the Sheriff.
The caliber and creativity of Jack Frost is made poignantly clear during the feature’s opening credits, in which the camera pans over a Christmas tree, it ointments having the cast and crews’ names loving hand-painted on each decoration as a black humor tale is being told to a male crewmember (uncredited), as he naively breaks the storyline in order to ask, in a tin-eared soprano, “innocent questions.” It is with such irrelevance, gusto, and fervor that Cooney gives us his low budget treat. For example, the filmmaker shrewdly assessed that spending an extra dime on authentic snow would be futile given the premise and scope of the feature and, as such, opts to lend to the over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek atmosphere by providing his audience with perhaps the “most faux” snow on cinematic record via dehydrated potato flakes. More comedy than horror, it is such examples of the “little touches,” aligned with the seemingly perpetual eyeball-rolling one-liners, that makes Cooney’s picture pure escapist pleasure.
Beginning with the brunt of his film’s action taking place in a scruffy little burg unapologetically named “Snomonton,” how can one not enjoy the wry criticism involved with having one of the backwoods townsfolk, Jake (Jack Lindine), complain, “When I want philosophy, I’ll turn on Oprah” or the screwball humor involved in Sam and two of his deputies–standing over a frozen corpse, prostrate in a rocking chair–puzzling over the crime scene as, all the while, we watch (from the corpse’s POV nonetheless) as the deceased rocks inexplicably to and fro until Joe nonchalantly instructs “Take your foot off the chair”? It is with the same deadpan irony, reminiscent of Buster Keaton’s comic sensibilities, that Sam enters his office and, upon asking his secretary, Marla (Marsha Clark), what’s wrong and whether or not somebody died, that the latter produces a note that succinctly reads “Somebody died.” It is with a similar Vaudevillian air that Cooney ingeniously issues an execution scene using exceedingly tawdry camerawork (again, a creative dodge as the director circumvents his limited budget) which, as a consequence, exponentially increases the comic mayhem, the same hilarity that threatens to overflow each an every minute amid Paul (F. William Parker), the owner of Davrow Hardware, using any occasion–be it Christmas, a person’s execution, the report that a killer is on the lamb, etc.–to offer 20% off select items, the same character who will later, after glimpsing the killer snowman, goes insane and spend the remainder of the film screaming “Fucker’s a snowman! Fucker’s a snowman!” as he knocks the heads off of every snow sculpture he can find.
The acting in Jack Frost is poignantly, albeit deliberately, awful as the actors, all professionals, refocus their energies upon timing as Special Agent Manners, a federal investigator, asks Sam “Have the M.V.s been moved?” Sam pauses, attempting to reconcile the acronym’s foreign usage, before giving up and meekly offering “Motor vehicles?” to which Manners, straining to maintain his composure and patience, states “Mur-der vic-tims.” In a similar instance in which the cast have their finger on the comic pulse, the Sheriff’s wife, Anne (Eileen Seeley) cuts short the verbose Joe (Chip Heller) in mid-sentence by slamming a car door in his face. Joe pauses and walks around the vehicle before resuming exactly where he’d left off as Anne’s–as well as the audience’s–exasperation resounds upon the actress’s face.
Of historic note, the then unknown Shannon Elizabeth, in her first film role, rehearses for her career as Resident Striptease. However, approaching genre cliché as he does most every other facet of the feature, Cooney posits the otherwise trite horror component as absurd as our anticipation dissipates in the wake of bare skin as Elizabeth’s character, Jill, continues to molt layer-upon-layer of winter clothing. Refusing his audience a moment’s reprieve from hyperventilation via laughter, he continues by having Jill symbolically raped by Jack as we come to realize that the snowman’s nose is missing as the killer accosts the bathing beauty prior to the scene’s climax as Cooney pauses to issue a flippant nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho before Frost lights his post-coital pipe.
It is alongside the coyly placed image of the snowman, seen in the guise of Pez dispensers, coffee cups, various Christmas decorations, stuffed toys, signs, and–best of all–police tape in Sam’s office, cutout in shape of snowmen, that we come to the foul-mouthed killer himself. Only after the ominous killer doll, Chucky, and, arguably, the latter-day Freddy Kruger, do we find such a willfully sardonic and loquacious murderer. At the faint inquiry by Jill’s boyfriend, Tommy (Darren Campbell), of “Who’s out there?” Frost pithily replies, “Well, it ain’t fuckin’ Frosty!” which is quickly followed by the question of “Who are you?” to which the killer states, “The world’s most pissed off snow cone.”
However, amid all of the comic lunacy, what is remarkable about Jack Frost in how Cooney manages to produce a barrage of tension-filled scenes. For example, as Manners rejoices at the thought that the killer has been subdued, he states “It’s at times like this when I think all we can do is turn our eyes up to the Heavens and say . . . . Oh shit” (as “Silent Night, Holy Night” plays in the background). Remarkable still yet is how the director somehow manages to incorporate a metaphysical (however remote) examination within his narrative as the geneticist (Rob LaBelle) who created the DNA-altering substance notes that that the soul has been proven to be chemical as a consequence of Frost’s continued existence. It is not often that one would expect an atheistic motif to appear in the same production as a joke such as “What is the difference between a snowman and a snowwoman? . . . Snowballs!”
On this note, I will abstain from discussing the film’s highly appropriate (given the circumstances) short-term, as well as long-term, solution to the thwarting of Jack Frost. However, suffice it to say, a nice instance of jaw-dropping surprise is involved as Cooney nonetheless inserts a very handy recipe no-no for his viewers before presenting us with the most unlikely of Deus ex Machinas followed by one of the strangest of symbolic baptisms in cinematic history.
Michael Cooney’s Jack Frost is a masterful B-movie horror comedy which, thankfully, never oversteps its bounds as the director remains mindfully judicious of the perimeters which his budget has been set. While never stepping on toes (though, to the audience’s forewarning, perhaps some brain cells), one could not expect more fun from a premise involving a serial killing snowman. Of course, the only thing more enjoyable are those who complain of such a film, ergo implying that a serious grievance could plausibly be filed against something which (very loudly and unabashedly) declares nothing at the gate.
-Egregious Gurnow
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- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
