A Year Before Jack Frost Was Michael Keaton, He Was a Slasher

The Big Picture

• Jack Frost fails to deliver genuine scares or effective horror moments despite being marketed as a horror comedy.
• The film lacks a commitment to build up tension and resolve it, resulting in a lack of payoff for the audience.
• A movie that laughs at itself can't make the audience truly laugh along; it needs to take itself seriously to engage viewers.

Not every movie can be great. Unfortunately, films like Jack Frost exist. And no, I'm not talking about the 1998 Michael Keaton comedy. One year before that, in the bountiful age of 1997, another cinematic experience came into existence. That would be another film called Jack Frost, but instead of being a nice family comedy, this one is a Christmas-themed slasher film. In it, a serial killer named Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) is killed by the authorities, only for his DNA to fuse with snow on the ground. The result is Frost being resurrected as a savage, bloodthirsty snowman. Sounds like it could be a fun time, right? After all, holiday-themed slasher movies are typically self-aware and comedic enough that they can get a pass for any other shortcomings. The thing is, most other slasher movies try. Jack Frost does not.

Despite being a self-described horror comedy, Jack Frost hardly tries to bring any sort of real terror to the table at all. Sure, there are scenes that appear to try and build up scares, but the movie lacks any true technical skill to achieve genuine, effective horror moments. Per a 2013 Fangoria interview, director Michael Cooney might own that part of the equation, but one problem that he doesn't address is that the movie doesn't commit to anything that it builds up, aside from its jokes. If you're making a horror movie, you have to have some sort of satisfying resolution to any bit of tension that you build up. When you don't, you're just wasting your audience's time. The team behind the scenes might have thought that they had the jokes to counteract the lack of payoff with scares and on-screen kills, but barely any of the gags land either. So in total, Jack Frost has nothing to offer. It hurts to dog on a movie that appears to have been fun to make, but that's just the nature of things. If a movie doesn't work, then it just doesn't work.

Jack Frost (1997)

After an accident that left murderer Jack Frost dead in genetic material the vengeful killer returns as a murderous snowman to exact his revenge on the man who sent him to be executed

What Is 'Jack Frost' About?

If you've never heard of Jack Frost, then buckle up for a bumpy ride. This 1997 slasher was directed by Michael Cooney, a filmmaker with tons of experience these days as a screenwriter, but at the time was still new to the professional filmmaking game. In his debut feature, Cooney tells the story of Jack Frost, a serial killer who is killed by law enforcement and turned into a snowman. Once he is revived in his new, frigid, powdery form, Frost moves on to stalk and murder the residents of a small town.

After two decades in which slashers dominated the landscape of horror, Jack Frost came along and died at the very end of the subgenre's initial lifespan. The year was 1997, and Scream had just resurrected this wing of spooky cinema in a way that would ripple into the mid-2000s with movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer. Instead of riding that wave, Jack Frost appears to operate more so in the same vein as past slasher movies, particularly the lesser-known wave of B-tier slasher movies. Not the subgenre's underrated picks, though. We're talking about direct-to-video trash with no budget — it has loads of POV shots that stalk locations, a synth score that warbles in and out of the picture, unnecessary sex scenes (kind of) that are thrown in due to a lack of plot, and an enormous cast of characters that have no purpose other than to be slaughtered by the villainous snowman, Jack Frost.

The Payoff Is Why We Love Slasher Movies

That last little bit about slasher movie tropes might have sounded like it was coming from a negative place, but the simplicity and familiarity of these films is what makes them fun. Not every movie needs to be Oscar-worthy — sometimes you just want a wild 90 minutes that makes you jump a little here, laugh a little there, and leave you walking away feeling like you were provided a good time by the filmmakers. Directors, screenwriters, and actors typically don't always owe the audience something for watching their work, but with slasher movies, we're promised setup and payoff. Build up to scares, and a good kill shot that makes everyone in the room scream or laugh in shock.

Why 'Jack Frost' Fails as a Slasher Film

Jack Frost does a lot of setting up, but delivers almost no pay-off. Almost every time Frost moves in to kill a character, we see the POV of Frost or the weapon that he's using, the reaction of the victim, and that's it. That or the camera cuts away, completely deflating any of the fun. Instead, the film hones in on jokes about snowman balls and an overly cheeky self-aware sense of humor.

In the aforementioned 2013 interview with Fangoria, Cooney said,

"...as we started to go into production, we said, 'Look, for half a million dollars, we’re not going to be able to make this a serious, dramatic, scary piece.' We looked at the snowman we had created and felt, 'We have to be faithful to what that snowman is. That snowman isn’t scary. If it’s killing people, that’s going to be terrible for the characters, but it ain’t frightening.' I think the original Jack Frost has this lovely, confident tone in what it is. It knows it’s not trying to be serious, and everybody involved knew they were making the same movie."

If a Movie Laughs At Itself, the Audience Won't Want To

The thing is, when you're making a movie that knows it's stupid, you can't laugh with the audience. You have to take every moment seriously — why else would the audience care? There are a few baffling-yet-hilarious moments, like when a character gets his head cut off by a sled, or the initial incident when Jack Frost is killed and turned into a snowman. Those scenes are played straight. That said, they're going for everything on such a low-budget that it's clear that they're in on the joke. Even the cheap snowman costume that is used to stand in on-screen as Jack Frost works. It's incredibly fake, but that's the fun of it. As long as the characters act like it's real, we'll go with them on it.

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As the movie goes on, it abandons the synth score for a heavy metal soundtrack, and dials up the joke meter to a hundred. The filmmakers might as well have left in bloopers of actors bursting out laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. Just imagine you're at a stand-up comedy show, and the comedian won't stop laughing at all of their own jokes. They can barely even get through their routine because they're too busy laughing. They'd be a terrible comedian and the audience would never have a real moment to laugh. The same goes for movies. Those on-screen and behind the camera have to stick to the bit so that everyone watching can let loose.

Jack Frost has a few redeeming qualities, but they are truly few in numbers. The movie has a nice Christmas atmosphere that somewhat gets us in the holiday spirit. There's also a fun, cheap-o, 90s feel to the whole movie, so if you grew up watching lousy horror movies on the Sci-Fi Channel, then this might hit a bit of a sweet spot for you. A couple jokes do actually manage to land here and there, with each of them being about as welcome as a raindrop in the desert. There's one in particular in which two characters are trying to hook up, but they've just come in from the cold and have to take off what seems to be a dozen layers. The buildup goes on and on for about a minute. I'll had it to Cooney, that joke works very well. Otherwise, there's nothing to see here.

If you like watching movies that constantly pull the rug out from you, never delivering on any of its promises and perpetually making you feel like you're wasting your time, then Jack Frost is a goldmine. It's no fun dogging on a movie that a director called "the most fun I've ever had" (see that 2013 Fangoria interview), but that's just what happens when you make a horror comedy with little to no horror and that's too busy laughing at its own jokes. Jack Frost is anything but a Christmas miracle.

Jack Frost is available to stream on Prime Video in the U.S.

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