Jack Frost Reviews

It might, just might, be possible to make a good movie about a killer snowman, but the sillliness of its premise is actually only one of JACK FROST's problems. One winter's night, the transport vehicle carrying serial killer Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) to his execution collides with a tanker full of a genetic chemical. The accident showers Jack with the chemical, which bonds his atoms with the snow. The result is a living snowman who makes his way to nearby Snomonton, where Jack was captured by sheriff Sam Tiler (Chris Allport). One of his first victims is a teenager who has bullied Sam's son Ryan (Zach Eginton), but Sam won't believe Ryan's story that a snowman was responsible. Jack continues to bump off Snomonton's residents, and Sam is joined in tracking the killer by FBI agent Manners (Stephen Mendel) and Stone (Rob LaBelle), a scientist who created the chemical. At first, they use hairdryers and an explosion to melt Jack down, but he reconstitutes himself and keeps coming. In a struggle with Jack, Sam hits him with an oat snack made by Ryan, which disfigures the snowman. Sam learns that his son put antifreeze into the mixture (in a dimwitted effort to keep his father warm) and has a pickup truck's bed filled with the fluid. Sam forces Jack into the truck, the snowman is dissolved, and the antifreeze is drained into jugs and buried--and continues to bubble with Jack's lifeforce.... With a story line like the preceding, it's hard to imagine anyone taking JACK FROST seriously. Yet while it seems to have clearly been written as a comedy, it has been directed completely straight--which is especially odd given that the writer and director were the same person, Michael Cooney. The intent may have been for the deadpan treatment to balance the material's absurdity, but Cooney's touch isn't nearly sure enough to pull it off. Nor does he convince that his story is taking place during the winter, what with all the leafy trees and blatantly fake snow on view. Equally unconvincing is Jack Frost's snowman incarnation, an obvious foam figure that spouts sub-Freddy Krueger one-liners (and apes Mr. Potato Head's "Look, I'm a Picasso!" schtick from TOY STORY). As the human Jack, MacDonald has a couple of good moments, and the title sequence is clever, but the movie falls apart long before its most gratuitous scene: the snowman's assault on a naked teenaged girl with his repositioned carrot nose. (Graphic violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity.)