Summer of Blood: Horror in the late '90s, or: Snowman's Land
Don't miss the first part of this two-part review!
It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he can't be compared even a little bit to the visceral, Lovecraftian horror of the titular character from the 1998 Jack Frost, which is a fantasy movie for children.
Basically, it's a horrible Christmas-themed version of the musical Carousel (or, if you want to be snooty, the play Liliom, upon which Carousel was based), in which a middle-aged man on the cusp of his big break as a rock star ignores his son, dies, is reincarnated as a snowman, and learns how to be a better father. It's entirely possible that this would work, somewhat, if the snowman wasn't voiced by Michael Keaton, an actor who is frequently capable of greatness, but whose line deliveries tend towards an edgy, tightly-coiled energy that suggest somebody ready to blow just underneath the words; and given Jack Frost's tendency to speak largely in snow-related quips (seriously, the two Jack Frost pictures are fucking indistinguishable, except that in one of them the bully loses a snowball fight, and in the other the bully is decapitated with a sled), this makes him seem like a bent rage addict funneling all his anger into caustic humor (it's way too reminiscent of the performance he gave in Beetlejuice, actually, and that's just not okay). There's one particularly grim moment of soul-sucking wordplay where the snowman and his son are celebrating a shared triumph, and Jack says, "You da man!", because remember, this was made in the late '90s, and his son Charlie (Joseph Cross) replies, "No, you da man!", and Jack quips back, "Nope! I'm the snowman! HAH HAH HAH". And as lamentable as that pun is, and emblematic of how dire and insulting the bulk of Mark Steven Johnson's screenplay is, the part that really goes from, "oh, what a routinely lousy children's movie", to "GOD GET IT OFF ME IT'S BURNING" is that fake, forced laugh, Keaton coughing out the sounds of mirth so unnaturally that if he had immediately turned around and ripped the boy's head off with his eerie branch arms with their floppy, flat little mitten hands, it would have been infinitely more understandable than the filmmakers' desire that we find this cute.
So Keaton's a problem. But even he is only the second-biggest liability in the film, for he is but the voice and briefly-human precursor of Jack the Snowman, an eldritch abomination if I ever did see one. It's a singularly persuasive piece of machinery built by the Jim Henson Creature Shop (there are a few shots in which it is played by a glossy CGI effect, as well), but "persuasive" means here only that it is convincing in its movements as something living, not that it actually convinces as an animated snowman. And it fails even more at seeming even slightly appealing or friendly - it looks like a perversity of nature, moving its horrible, rubbery mouth and flexing its horrible, overly expressive facial features, and staring with its unpleasantly small eyes that look pitch black (black as coal, you might say) in all but bright, direct light, in which case you can see the glue-grey irises around the edges of those eyes. And begad, if the deep black eyes with nothing behind them but the infinity of death are freaky, the eyes with just enough detail to look vaguely human are much, much worse.
Other than the fact that its protagonist was issued from a rank pit of Hell to torment the godly, Jack Frost is actually pretty blandly generic kiddie filmmaking, with no story really deserving of the name: Jack was so busy with his career that he almost missed Christmas, but decided just in the nick of time to head to be with his son and wife Gabby (Kelly Preston). But a freak snowstorm hit, and he crashed his car and died. He died on Christmas Day. If nothing else, I admire it for having the balls to go there. The snowballs, I would say, except that the movie already makes, like, five puns about snow balls, and I don't want to relive them.
So anyway, Jack comes back and life lessons, though the stakes of the film are so ungodly low that I couldn't really tell you why the universe would bother bending its rules to make this miracle happen. And Charlie himself seems largely unmoved; the emotional beats, at least as they are played by the actors and director Troy Miller, would be entirely unchanged if Jack had simply disappeared for months after a boring, run-of-the-mill divorce (an impression strengthened by how very little Preston gets to do, mostly just looking alarmed in reaction shots and never interacting with the snowman until the film's penultimate scene). There's absolutely no overarching plot, simply scenes during which the snowman thaws Charlie's resentment, and eventually teaches him some hockey tips, and then when enough scenes have transpired to make a feature, there's a brief race against time leading arbitrarily into a desultory wrap-up, suggesting that Johnson understood that copying E.T. was a safe bet, but didn't care why.
It is, unsurprisingly, not very good cinema. Miller and the hilariously overqualified cinematographer László Kovács (the things that happened to that man's career after the 1980s started up are indescribably depressing) are hellbent on close-ups that use the anamorphic frame in the most artless way: a lot of heads just kind of bobbing around in oppressive widescreen space. There are some clumsy attempts at kinetic editing, and the most aesthetically distinctive thing about the film is its unusually brutish soundtrack, beginning with a hard-rock cover of "Frosty the Snowman" played by Jack's band, moving on past a dumbfounding use of Fleetwood Mac's melancholic and not at all child-appropriate "Landslide", apparently because it has the words "snow-covered" in the lyrics, and arriving at a singularly unforgivable cover of "Gimme Some Lovin'" by Hanson, because remember, this was made in the late '90s.
Basically, it is everything I have ever hated about children's entertainment combined in one place: canned emotions and deadening plot points of the utmost predictability crammed together with shrill, sardonic anti-humor and a lazy reliance on musical montages to paper over the sucking holes in the conflict. Add the viscerally unappealing central character, and the whole thing is just the absolute pits. It took a lot to be the worst reincarnation fantasy titled Jack Frost from the second half of the 1990s, but by golly, they found a way.
Body Count: Just the one.
It says everything that the titular character character from the 1997 Jack Frost is the soul of a serial killer, who turned his victims into meat pies, inhabiting a snowman who murders people, including one whose face he bites off with his icicle teeth, and he can't be compared even a little bit to the visceral, Lovecraftian horror of the titular character from the 1998 Jack Frost, which is a fantasy movie for children.
Basically, it's a horrible Christmas-themed version of the musical Carousel (or, if you want to be snooty, the play Liliom, upon which Carousel was based), in which a middle-aged man on the cusp of his big break as a rock star ignores his son, dies, is reincarnated as a snowman, and learns how to be a better father. It's entirely possible that this would work, somewhat, if the snowman wasn't voiced by Michael Keaton, an actor who is frequently capable of greatness, but whose line deliveries tend towards an edgy, tightly-coiled energy that suggest somebody ready to blow just underneath the words; and given Jack Frost's tendency to speak largely in snow-related quips (seriously, the two Jack Frost pictures are fucking indistinguishable, except that in one of them the bully loses a snowball fight, and in the other the bully is decapitated with a sled), this makes him seem like a bent rage addict funneling all his anger into caustic humor (it's way too reminiscent of the performance he gave in Beetlejuice, actually, and that's just not okay). There's one particularly grim moment of soul-sucking wordplay where the snowman and his son are celebrating a shared triumph, and Jack says, "You da man!", because remember, this was made in the late '90s, and his son Charlie (Joseph Cross) replies, "No, you da man!", and Jack quips back, "Nope! I'm the snowman! HAH HAH HAH". And as lamentable as that pun is, and emblematic of how dire and insulting the bulk of Mark Steven Johnson's screenplay is, the part that really goes from, "oh, what a routinely lousy children's movie", to "GOD GET IT OFF ME IT'S BURNING" is that fake, forced laugh, Keaton coughing out the sounds of mirth so unnaturally that if he had immediately turned around and ripped the boy's head off with his eerie branch arms with their floppy, flat little mitten hands, it would have been infinitely more understandable than the filmmakers' desire that we find this cute.
So Keaton's a problem. But even he is only the second-biggest liability in the film, for he is but the voice and briefly-human precursor of Jack the Snowman, an eldritch abomination if I ever did see one. It's a singularly persuasive piece of machinery built by the Jim Henson Creature Shop (there are a few shots in which it is played by a glossy CGI effect, as well), but "persuasive" means here only that it is convincing in its movements as something living, not that it actually convinces as an animated snowman. And it fails even more at seeming even slightly appealing or friendly - it looks like a perversity of nature, moving its horrible, rubbery mouth and flexing its horrible, overly expressive facial features, and staring with its unpleasantly small eyes that look pitch black (black as coal, you might say) in all but bright, direct light, in which case you can see the glue-grey irises around the edges of those eyes. And begad, if the deep black eyes with nothing behind them but the infinity of death are freaky, the eyes with just enough detail to look vaguely human are much, much worse.
Other than the fact that its protagonist was issued from a rank pit of Hell to torment the godly, Jack Frost is actually pretty blandly generic kiddie filmmaking, with no story really deserving of the name: Jack was so busy with his career that he almost missed Christmas, but decided just in the nick of time to head to be with his son and wife Gabby (Kelly Preston). But a freak snowstorm hit, and he crashed his car and died. He died on Christmas Day. If nothing else, I admire it for having the balls to go there. The snowballs, I would say, except that the movie already makes, like, five puns about snow balls, and I don't want to relive them.
So anyway, Jack comes back and life lessons, though the stakes of the film are so ungodly low that I couldn't really tell you why the universe would bother bending its rules to make this miracle happen. And Charlie himself seems largely unmoved; the emotional beats, at least as they are played by the actors and director Troy Miller, would be entirely unchanged if Jack had simply disappeared for months after a boring, run-of-the-mill divorce (an impression strengthened by how very little Preston gets to do, mostly just looking alarmed in reaction shots and never interacting with the snowman until the film's penultimate scene). There's absolutely no overarching plot, simply scenes during which the snowman thaws Charlie's resentment, and eventually teaches him some hockey tips, and then when enough scenes have transpired to make a feature, there's a brief race against time leading arbitrarily into a desultory wrap-up, suggesting that Johnson understood that copying E.T. was a safe bet, but didn't care why.
It is, unsurprisingly, not very good cinema. Miller and the hilariously overqualified cinematographer László Kovács (the things that happened to that man's career after the 1980s started up are indescribably depressing) are hellbent on close-ups that use the anamorphic frame in the most artless way: a lot of heads just kind of bobbing around in oppressive widescreen space. There are some clumsy attempts at kinetic editing, and the most aesthetically distinctive thing about the film is its unusually brutish soundtrack, beginning with a hard-rock cover of "Frosty the Snowman" played by Jack's band, moving on past a dumbfounding use of Fleetwood Mac's melancholic and not at all child-appropriate "Landslide", apparently because it has the words "snow-covered" in the lyrics, and arriving at a singularly unforgivable cover of "Gimme Some Lovin'" by Hanson, because remember, this was made in the late '90s.
Basically, it is everything I have ever hated about children's entertainment combined in one place: canned emotions and deadening plot points of the utmost predictability crammed together with shrill, sardonic anti-humor and a lazy reliance on musical montages to paper over the sucking holes in the conflict. Add the viscerally unappealing central character, and the whole thing is just the absolute pits. It took a lot to be the worst reincarnation fantasy titled Jack Frost from the second half of the 1990s, but by golly, they found a way.
Body Count: Just the one.
