Hello friends! Welcome back to Dyl’s Worst Christmas Ever, where I’m going through and reviewing some of the worst Christmas movies ever made. It’s fun. Torturous, but fun. Let’s get to today’s movie.
I’m not going to lie. I don’t really have a whole lot to say about Jack Frost. Why? Because I have a very low tolerance for this type of movie. In case you haven’t picked this up yet, I can really, really love bad movies. I’m not talking about just bad movies. Not the ones that are just bad in an non-entertaining way. Those suck. I’m talking about the ones that missed the mark so badly that they’ve become a piece of art in their own right. There’s nothing better than getting your friends together and watching an absolute trainwreck. Cats. The Room. Troll 2. These are all “so bad they’re good” classics. But, here’s the thing: they all started off with the best intentions. None of these filmmakers set out to make one of the worst crimes ever to be put on the big screen. No. They wanted to entertain. To share a piece of their soul with the audience. They just failed miserably. The best of these make you wonder if the creators were even human. How can so many things go wrong? It’s quite the artform. Now, purposely making a movie like this can be done. You just have to be extremely delicate about it. You can tell the story with a wink and a nod, but you absolutely have to still play it semi-straight. The concept that someone could stumble upon your film and think it was actually just bad bad has to be within the realm of possibility. Movies like Kung Fury, Evil Dead 2, and Sharknado fit that mold perfectly. They’re mostly played straight, but just over the top enough that it’s comical. What absolutely does not work is when you try to make something bad on purpose and play everything for laughs. These almost always fail in my opinion. They’re trying too hard. You can feel the director saying “Isn’t this wacky and weird?” Sure. Yeah. It is. But, it’s also not entertaining. I’m no longer peering inside the mind of a crazy person. I’m seeing what someone sane thinks that crazy person would think about. It’s just not the same. You’ve circled all the way back around to just making a bad bad movie again. There’s no entertainment value at all.
And, well, Jack Frost definitely fits into that final category. You can tell that they purposely set out to make a B-list schlocky horror film that people would laugh at. Every single kill. Every one liner. Every moment. You can feel the creative team snickering behind the camera. And, well, it sucks. It feels very inauthentic. And, sure, you can claim that it’s a parody. But, if that’s true, shouldn’t I be laughing? There was one moment that actually made me chuckle and that’s it. For an hour and a half runtime, that’s really, really weak.
I know that this review is a lot different than the last couple I’ve written. I’m sorry if you were looking for me to point and laugh at all the silly parts in this movie. In a weird way, I feel like that’d be giving the creators of Jack Frost exactly what they want. And, I won’t have it. They haven’t deserved it. Plain and simple.
Also, the sequel, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, was originally on this list but has been removed. It’s from the same team. I’m going to assume they went into it with the same thought process. And, I really don’t want to essentially write-up the same thing twice. So, congratulations, 1998’s family film, Jack Frost. You’ve made it back onto the list! It’s only fitting, since the idea of the two of you being next to each other on Blockbuster shelves has intrigued me for decades.
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