Merry Christmas-ish! Depending on when you read this, I guess. Horror and Christmas go together like peanut butter and something that usually doesn't belong with peanut butter but is great in the right circumstances. Movies like Gremlins, and Krampus are perfect examples of what can happen when horror plus Christmas works well. And then there's Jack Frost. Not the Michael Keaton family movie, although I can see how you might think that. That movie is pretty scary. No, this Jack Frost is the campy Christmas slasher with the killer snowman. How is it? Let's check it out (you can watch it for free right now if you have Amazon Prime) and beware spoilers if you care about spoilers for a movie about a killer snowman.
Now, don't let the Rotten Tomatoes scores discourage you from watching this movie because you absolutely should. This is one of those campy "so bad it's good" movies that of course the critics would hate, so don't look at their 7% and dismiss the movie outright. Written and directed by Michael Cooney (whom you might know as the writer of Identity and Man of Tai Chi) this is a movie about a captured serial killer named Jack Frost who, while en route to his execution, get's into an accident with some chemicals that turns him into an immortal killer snowman who goes after the small town sheriff who caught him in the first place. That's it. That's the whole plot.
Jack Frost stars basically nobody, though there is about 10 minutes of screen time given to a young Shannon Elizabeth in her very first roll ever, seen here being murdered by a snowman in the bath tub.
The real star of the show however is Scott McDonald as the one-liner-slinging Jack Frost. And when I mean slinging, I mean there are a lot of one-liners in this movie. Like, a lot. Most of them are laughably terrible but...no, actually they're all laughably terrible. Everything about this movie is laughably terrible. From the opening scene with the super fake looking snow storm, to the super fake looking snow, to the cheesy acting, to the one-liners. As far as effects go, most of it is done practically with the exception of the snow storm overlay at the beginning. However, the budget for Jack Frost could not have been very big because even the practical effects aren't anything to write home about. I've seen worse, but these aren't good by any means. But like my peanut butter example earlier, it just kind of works for this particular movie. If the effects were far and away better than the acting it wouldn't have worked as well, so the cheesiness of the effects to me fits perfectly with the rest of the cheesiness of this movie.
Unfortunately, there really isn't too much I can say about this movie. All I can do is highly recommend that you watch it unless you didn't like that clip. It's no Gremlins and certainly no Krampus, but if you're into cheesy horror movies and like Christmas, give Jack Frost a shot. At worst it's not a long movie, and at best you'll be thoroughly entertained.
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