Today, I wanted to take a look at 1997's "Jack Frost".
No, not the Michael Keaton flick where a man comes back from the dead as a snowman to complete some unfinished business.
We're talking about the movie where a man comes back from the dead as a snowman to complete some unfinished business.
And then rapes a girl with his carrot nose. But we'll get to that later.
As you can probably tell, this is a classy classy film.
The movie starts with a voiceover as the camera pans around a Christmas tree with the cast and crew listed on ornaments. A squeaky young girl asks for a story from her inexplicably Australian uncle. The uncle obliges and tells her about Jack Frost, a serial murderer who wanders from town to town killing anyone he feels like. He's a classic 80's villain transplanted into the 90's with no back story or motive for his violent ways. He just kills because we wouldn't have much of a movie if it was Jack Frost the guy who maybe jaywalks once in a while because damn the man.
No, the voiceover explains that Jack "Plot Device" Frost had managed to elude capture for "Five years, eleven states and thirty-eight deaths" before being caught and sentenced to death. And then, for no reason whatsoever, in a plot point that is never brought up again, the Australian uncle tells us that the remains showed up in meat pies across the country.
What?
He's a traveling serial killer who somehow manages to get his victims to a national distributor to have them baked into meat pies and shipped out to stores across America? I'm just going to assume that someone in the writer's room took a break and went to see "Sweeney Todd", came back and decided "Yeah, that was fucking awesome! I'm gonna drop that into the story. We'll say it's a homage if anyone calls us on it."
And then the actual movie starts.
We open with a shot of a van labeled "State Executional Transfer Vehicle". Yes, "Executional". There's a little red squiggly line underneath that word every time I type it informing me that either Firefox's spell check is not up to par, or they straight made up a word and slapped it on the side of a van because they didn't trust the audience enough to know that when they said Jack Frost was on his way to being executed, they meant it.
This is going to be a running thing throughout the movie. Every single vehicle has a description written on the side. It's like an obsessive-compulsive went through with a label maker and managed to get every car, truck and van before being caught by the production staff. And then the production staff shrugged and got on with filming the movie because scraping off all those words would have been hard.
Our villain, Jack, is in the back of the van, shackled to the wall. At least I assume he's shackled to the wall. Otherwise he'd just be loose to attack and strangle the correctional officer back there with him when the officer doesn't share his cigarette.
Oh wait.
Yes, one of the themes in this movie is that everyone in it is too stupid to live.
Anyway, as they drive through the snow, the camera switches to another truck with"GCC Genetic Research" painted on the side. Due to the poor weather, the two vehicles predictably crash, freeing Jack. Because that's how doors on the back of correctional facility prisoner transports work. Shut up.
As Jack celebrates his new found freedom by just standing there instead of running off into the nearby woods, the chemicals in the Genetic Research truck explode and home in on Jack like he was a chemical attracting magnet made only to get doused in chemicals. Jack get's drenched, and melts for the first time in this movie.
Jack is presumed dead by the authorities, but we in the audience know better. No, we have been included in the deep secret that Jack is still alive because the chemicals have altered Jack's DNA. Through the miracle of computer animation, we are treated to a scene showing Jack's cells, the building blocks of his body, morphing. Jack's entire body is changing.
To snow.
I know what you at home are saying right now, and yes, this entire movie's opening plot is basically "The Secret World of Alex Mack" with a serial killer.
The scene shifts away from Jack's plight, and we are introduced to the cast, the principal protagonists/idiots. The hero of the movie is the small town sheriff that caught Jack and ended his murder spree. Don't get the wrong idea, it wasn't through any heroism on the Sheriff's part. He found Jack on the side of the road by a broken down car with no weapons, and, in the tradition of small town sheriffs everywhere, didn't like seeing a strange person in his town and ordered him to get on the ground. I can only imagine his surprise when he found out he wasn't just hassling some lost cityfolk and realized he was actually arresting a criminal. I imagine pants-wetting was involved.
Jack was understandably pissed, and proceeded to send anonymous notes to the sheriff made from letters cut from magazines. That he then signed. In magazine letters. This isn't even one of the movies where you can root for the bad guy because every character is that stupid. EVERYONE drank bleach as a child in this flick.
Sheriff Sam is now haunted by Jack's promise to murder him, his family and his entire town. And Jack's murder eyes.
Sheriff Sam's family is rounded out by his wife and his son, Devil Child.
Sheriff Sam and his family's small town is filled out with quirky individuals whose only personality is their individual quirk. There's Business Minded Store Owner, who offers a discount on everything the town needs to save itself from the homicidal snowman. There's Drunk Mom and Angry Dad who are the parents of Bully Son and daughter, slutty Shannon Elizabeth.
Slutty Shannon Elizabeth seduces horny Only Other Teen in the Town, son of Business Minded Store Owner.
She's also the inadvertent receiver of the unexpected carrot sex. But we'll get to that later.
There are other townfolk with speaking lines and one note characterization, but I don't care about them.
The movie proceeds to build tension by showing the weird stuff going on around town that no one connects the dots and comes up with "Killer Snowman".
Random Old Man On The Outskirts Of Town is found frozen in his rocking chair.
And apparently mummified. Because a killer snowman can do that.
A random snowman shows up on Sheriff Sam's front lawn that his wife assumes Devil Child made. By the way, this is the first shot of the villain of the movie in his snowman state.
As you can see, no expense was spared in the special effects department.
Devil Child denies making the snow man, but mother pays no mind and gives him a carrot and coal that she just happened to have picked up at the grocery store. Devil Child shrugs, accepting that his sacrifices to the Dark Lord Satan must finally be paying off in that he's provided him with a snowman. He wanted an Xbox, but whatever. It's a start. (Editor's note: This doesn't actually happen.)
Devil Child takes the coal and carrot and places them in the already suspiciously placed dents on the snowman, giving our villain a face. And twigs for eyebrows somehow, even though Devil Child didn't pick up any twigs.
As he finishes up decorating Jack, Bully Son shows up with his Bully Lackeys and tells Devil Child that he's in the way of their sledding run. Devil Child backs down, and Bully Son makes his point by knocking the head off of Jack Frost. Lackey #1, in celebration, lays down and starts sledding right there. On the flat ground. With no hill. Jack takes the opportunity to take a snow-fist to Bully Son, knocking him to the ground directly in the path of the sledding Lackey. Lackey, traveling at sub 5 MPH speed, runs over Bully Son's neck, decapitating him and sending his head flying in a curious example of movie physics.
Angry Dad rightly suspects Devil Child in his son's death, but we assume Bully Lackey's clam up because snitches get stitches, and Devil Child blames the snowman.
No arrests are made because Sheriff Sam is used to covering up his child's murders by now. (Editor's note: This isn't in the movie either.) Devil Child, in thanks makes a weird oatmeal/chocolate/marshmallow/possible dog shit/secret ingredient mix for his dad, who, knowing his son's deadly ways (Editor's note: Stop that), sticks the mixture in a bag and promises to have it for lunch at work.
Tension continues to build until an unambiguous murder happens when Drunk Mom and Angry Dad are relaxing in their home after Bully Son's death. Jack Frost shows up, asks for a hit off of the pipe of Angry Dad, and when he isn't given what he wants, he forces Angry Dad to deepthroat the axe handle to death and follows up by stuffing Christmas ornament balls into Drunk Mom's mouth.
We aren't going to get into the sexual politics of "Jack Frost" but there's a whole essay waiting for the enterprising college student. Go nuts with my blessing.
Business Minded Store Owner sees the aftermath and runs screaming into the night even though his truck is right fucking there and he knows its subzero temperatures outside and everyone lives on the outskirts of town meaning he's got an enormous hike ahead of him. Screaming. All the way. Spoiler alert, the next time we see him he's still screaming. So he screamed and ran for miles at a time. For a chubby bearded man, dude had a set of lungs on him.
Sheriff Sam has flashbacks to Jack's murder eyes
and bursts into the police station, giving orders to his secretary/deputy/big haired monstrosity without looking at her to call the FBI to find out if Jack's really dead. Because the feds love it when people call up to check the status of people already dead. I'm sure they get twenty calls a day about Lee Harvey Oswald checking to make sure he's still in the ground. He's surprised when he turns around and finds an FBI agent and his stooge sitting in his office waiting for him.
They say that they're here for the murders that just happened and maybe just maybe Jack Frost could be involved. They declare a town emergency and ask everyone to gather in the church for the night for safety. The Feds and the Sherrif go back to the crime scene where they stick what can only be described as a P.K.E. meter into a puddle of water. When Sheriff Sam asks them what the hell they're doing, the FBI agent delivers what is probably my favorite line of the movie:
"You're obviously not a man of science, Sheriff."
Let's take a moment to look at that little sentence in awe. In a movie about a giant living murder snowman, a character is denigrated for not being a man of science when he questions the Ghostbusters prop being used in his neighbor's living room.
But wait, you're probably all saying, where was Slutty Shannon Elizabeth during all this? Isn't that her parents that just got violated by Jack Frost?
It turns out that Slutty Shannon Elizabeth and Only Other Teen in the Town had take advantage of the state of emergency and broken into the Sheriff's house to get it on. Because the Sheriff's house is the town's makeout spot. Forget Lover's Lane. Forget Blueberry Hill. Every teen in the town, all two of them, love to pull a B&E to make it in the Sheriff's bed.
Unfortunately for them, Jack Frost also decided that the Sheriff's abandoned house was an awesome place to hang out. He'd also figured out how to shoot icicles out of his hands, as Only Other Teen in Town finds out in the kitchen while Slutty Elizabeth Shannon is upstairs stripping out of her twenty layers of clothes.
Not hearing her boyfriend's screams from twenty feet away, Slutty Shannon Elizabeth finds a bath waiting for her. Thinking that now deceased Only Other Teen in Town had drawn her a bath she strips down and hops in.
Big mistake.
Jack Frost, the magic snowman, has figured out how to turn into water and back again. He re-solidifies around Slutty Shannon Elizabeth, noticeably minus his carrot nose.
Two guesses where the carrot is instead.
It's all played off as a joke, but the scene was really really disturbing. There are thrusting motions between Shannon and the snowman puppet. Her hand was seen in silhouette in a window waving, and a passing deputy waved back.
Remember that bit about the essay on the sexual politics of Jack Frost? There's your thesis right there.
At this point, everyone in town has finally realized there's a killer snowman on the loose. Mostly because Business Minded Store Owner made it back into town and managed to yell out, "Fucker's a Snowman!" Plot exposition out of the way they try to fight back against the deadly Jack Frost. For starters, they blow up the Sheriff's station with Jack still inside, melting him. As we already discovered, Jack is fine with being melted, as he simply reforms, scarf and all.
What's crazy is they do the exact same thing again, forcing Jack into a furnace with hair dryers. The snowman still doesn't care and simply reforms, more pissed off than before. It all comes down to Jack Frost, Sheriff Sam, and Devil Child stuck in a car after Jack comes in through the heater vents. Remember the disgusting mix that Devil Child gave his dad back in the beginning of the movie? As a last resort Sam mashes it in Jack's face, and Jack starts melting. Not snow melting, but acid in the face melting.
As Sheriff Sam and Devil Child escape, the truth comes out. When Sam asks what was in the oatmeal, Devil Child starts falling over himself apologizing. He put antifreeze in because he was worried that his dad "would get cold". If that was true, why was he apologizing as soon as he was discovered? The little bastard knew. He was trying to kill his own father for the insurance money. (Editor's note: This isn't in the movie either, but it makes sense. Kid is creepy.)
After that, it's all over except for the Scooby-Doo plot to drop Jack into a pick-up truck filled with antifreeze after a chase through a whorehouse. Which actually sounds much more interesting typed out than what actually happens.
The snowman melts, the good guys win and everyone moves on. Until the sequel anyway.
There was more to the movie, but I skipped over it for the sake of brevity. I was a little long-winded, but I couldn't leave you without one last image.
