Chillin' and Killin'

Once in a while comes a film that crosses the bad-good continuum in reverse, a film so terrible that somehow it becomes good. For many, Starship Troopers comes to mind, but the movie I have in mind had a far lower budget and an exponentially lower profile. To a great many who have seen it, Jack Frost (not the Michael Keaton family film, of course, but the 1996 B-movie that can be found in the horror section of most video stores) serves as the quintessential film in the so-bad-it’s-good genre.

Some of the readership of this blog might recall the first time I saw Jack Frost. Out at Joe’s ancestral manse in what has come to be known as the BP, a group of us rented it over some kind of holiday break with no idea what a surprise we were in for. I mean, this is a movie in which a random serial killer, while being transported to a different prison or something, gets genetically altered in an accident with a truck carrying some kind of scientific waste and becomes a mutant, killer snowman who can melt and re-freeze at will while he lays waste to the townsfolk of a small, snowy mountain hamlet. Of course, we should have known what was coming because, on the rental covers, there used to be a hologram designed so that, depending on how the light hit the cover, you might see the head of a normal snowman or the head of an evil snowman with menacingly green eyes and humungous fangs. To that original group, I think that the aforementioned ludicrous plot and horrendous, low-budget special effects (imagine a white oven mit being used as the killer snowman’s murdering hand) provided the most important comedic element.

But when I watched Jack Frost back at college, my friends there liked it for a different reason: the ridiculous puns. My roommate of three years, a man often referred to simply as “The Sex,” demonstrated a particular fondness for the following pun. When the killer snowman refreezes in the back yard of one of his early victims, the poor guy comes out of his house to smoke a cigarette when he hears a mysterious voice first ask to bum a smoke and then begin to taunt him. The guy runs around with an axe looking for the other person he can hear. How he could have been clueless to the fact the enormous, looming snowman, which must have come from nowhere from his point of view and which must have stood at least six feet tall, was the dangerous taunter is beyond me, but that only adds to the scene’s humor. Suddenly, the snowman takes the axe from the man’s hand and literally shoves it down the man’s throat, handle first so that the clean blade is sticking out of the victim’s mouth. The snowman says, “I only axed you for a smoke.” I can see people cringing now…but it’s so bad it’s good.

And of course, the most famous scene, the scene which inspired me to write this blog when Sean and I saw most of Jack Frost last night, has to be the one in which the snowman rapes Shannon Elizabeth’s character, Jill, in the bathtub. Now, Jack Frost was Shannon Elizabeth’s film debut, and I always have to wonder how she ever got any work afterward, but I digress. At any rate, she takes off her clothes and gets into a mysteriously drawn warm bath. After some gratuitous, mock-sensual shots of her legs, feet, and neck as she bathes, the water becomes mysteriously cold, and the snowman refreezes as Jill screams. It then bangs her against the tile wall, its carrot nose prominently absent. When the rape is over, the snowman utters “Looks like Christmas came a little early this year.” It then puts its literally steaming carrot nose back on. Who couldn’t find the humor in something like that? I tell you, Jack Frost is one for the ages.