Post by StevePulaski on Jun 6, 2011 15:20:18 GMT -5
Jack Frost holds a stop sign in Jack Frost.
Rating: ★★½
When I was real young, Family Video was my second home. I'd go in there, rarely renting much on Dvd (mostly VHS), and I would stare at all the movies in the store. I would venture through isles of randomly, non-genre sorted films and find the most obscure of titles.
I saw The Gingerdead Man, Santa's Slay, Uncle Sam, and this little gem. All were horror films with characters on the front cover staring at you. Jack Frost always freaked me out the most. His green eyes, holographic case, and razor sharp teeth seemed to be staring right through my innocent boy soul. The downside; I couldn't rent any of them. The manager of the store hardly let me rent anything that wasn't G or PG. I was probably around eleven, and everyone but that one guy would let me rent anything PG-13 or R.
I talked my mom into coming in with me to rent Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman. It was a few months after I was first introduced to the snowman, and when I finally got my mom into renting it the first film was gone. I watched Jack Frost 2 and loved every minute of it. It wasn't until this year did I finally see the first film. I've seen clips online, but never watched the full film. Now I can say if I die today, my life is complete.
The film is about a laidback sheriff named Sam (Allport) who just caught the famous murderer Jack Frost (MacDonald). Frost is scheduled to be executed and is being transported to the place where he will be killed. A truck filled with chemicals crashed into the truck with Jack and he escapes. He is splashed with highly dangerous acid which melts his whole body is covered with snow.
Sheriff Sam is continued to be haunted with memories of Jack and worries his and his family's safety could be in jeopardy. When a serious of odd and unexplainable murders are happening in the town, Sam realizes that Jack is living in the body of a snowman. Things continue to get stranger from then on.
As for the snowman, its been almost five years since I discovered the film, and the snowman himself continues to make me uneasy. There is something very scary about his voice, personality, and presence. The worst thing when I was a kid is when Jack speaks. He speaks in puns and constant jokes. Every time he speaks he says something stupid, but sometimes funny.
My favorite is when he repairs himself with his head where his arm should be, his nose on his stomach, etc and he says "Look ma, I'm a Picasso!" It's ridiculous and out of place, but it does add to the B movie quality this film is trying to achieve.
Right off the bat there are two problems. One is a snowman is a very difficult villain to pull off. He has no legs, meaning he must resort to lumbering around and sliding, and unless you mold arms, he has sticks for arms. Rarely do we see Jack Frost himself, in full form, kill someone. The worst scene is where is he trying to kill the old lady; we see closeups of her and the camera zooming in and out rapidly on Jack's face.
The second problem is the buildup. There is a thing called contrived suspense where the movie tries to get us scared before the actual event happens. This could mean a sudden increase in the music pitch or what not, but now it's a common thing to do any horror film. In this, the suspense buildup is sometimes ridiculously long, like when the teenager is looking for "the burglar" outside.
Jack Frost struggles noticably to maintain a runtime over eighty minutes by having the characters slow their actions down and have the snowman keep coming back and back. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's a bore. It's not as much fun as when I was a kid, but the villain and the laidback sheriff serve as two memories this nineties cult classic has to offer.
Starring: Christopher Allport, Stephen Mendel, F. William Parker, and Rob LaBelle. Directed by: Michael Cooney.