The Cheaper Jack Frost

Anthropomorphic personifications are hardly new. Humans have been doing it so long that finding the actual origin of any specific one is a bit of a fool’s errand. Jack Frost, by that name, seems to date to 1732, though of course a personification of cold is far older and goes by many names around the world. He’s one of those figures whose alignment ranges wildly on telling. Because, you know, he’s a force of nature, and how nature seems depends on how you view that aspect of it. All things considered, it’s never terribly surprising when he’s seen as a killer, though.

Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) is a serial killer on his way to his execution. In a truck, because this movie doesn’t understand how death row works. He’s killed in a collision with a chemical truck something something now he’s a killer snowman. Sure, okay, why not. And his target now is Sam Tiler (Christopher Allport), sheriff of Snowmanton because why not, who was the one who caught him and stopped his killing spree. He kills a whole bunch of other people in vaguely Christmasy ways. Then something something captured in antifreeze something something stuff happens.

I mean, look. I’m not a huge horror movie fan going in, and this is a horror movie that clearly cost about a buck fifty. The production company went out of business went bankrupt three weeks before filming began, and it was produced by the bank that handled things. The script had been written with the intention of being a big-budget special effects extravaganza to star Geena Davis, and the finished result is not that. And frankly, I don’t think having Geena Davis in it would’ve fixed things, because the problem is the script.

I won’t say I’ve never heard of anyone in this movie; for one thing, it’s the film debut of Shannon Elizabeth as the teen sexpot Jill Metzner. But it is a fairly obscure cast, and I can’t say I’ve seen most of them do other things. I can say that it would take an acting genius to do anything with a lot of these lines, and no one in here is an acting genius. This movie is dire. There’s something in it about how the soul is a chemical and they’re trying to preserve them in case of nuclear holocaust, and . . . what?

There’s Christmas accouterments in this movie. The so-far-as-I’m-concerned blameless victim Sally (Kelly Jean Peters, one of the ones I’ve seen in other things) is murdered with Christmas decorations. Fortunately, the version I watched trims the death scene of one of the characters from most of what’s in it, thank Gods, because it’s really unpleasant. It was pointed out what it looks like is happening to her, and they leaned into it. There are jokes I didn’t have to hear. They almost certainly weren’t funny anyway.