Though I am personally of the belief that all Christmas movies should wait until after Thanksgiving – it just stopped being 80F (26C) in New York City last week, yikes – I cannot fault a movie for being exactly what it sets out to be. The trailer for Hot Frosty, Netflix’s newest foray into Hallmark’s holiday territory, promised to answer the question no one was asking: what if Frosty the Snowman had abs?
Curious minds do, in fact, want to know. Thankfully, the actual finished product, 90 minutes of extremely unserious, occasionally sweet fluff written by Russell Hainline, delivers logistical and spiritual answers to the quandary of Half-Naked Alive Snowman with complete dedication to the genre. Said snowman, Jack (Dustin Milligan), awakens with barely a strategically placed scarf to cover him. The town of Hope Springs is even more of a New England (by way of Canada) mirage than Gilmore Girls’s Stars Hollow. The snow is obviously styrofoam. All the old women are horny. Also, Chrishell Stause lives there. Merry Christmas!
I have to appreciate a film that gets down to business immediately – 10 minutes after we learn that Kathy (Mean Girls’ Lacey Chabert) lives in a broken-down house, owns a cafe (sorry, Kathy’s Kafe), and is sad and alone, she has a ripped human ice box on her hands. Because she put the scarf on him, he has imprinted on her and says he loves her immediately. He runs cold, so he almost never wears a shirt (it would be nice if Mulligan’s abs came with slightly less childlike performance). Kathy’s doctor friend (Katy Mixon) concludes that Jack’s body temperature is below freezing and thus he is definitely a snowman – a fact most of the townspeople accept quite quickly because, as the kindly vintage store owner Jane (Lauren Holly) puts it, “a man that sweet has just gotta be magic, don’t you think?”
The point of Jack, so much as one exists, is to help Kathy heal following the death of her beloved husband from cancer, revealed by a doctor’s note that says “chemotherapy will start immediately” in Comic Sans (thank you, director Jerry Ciccoritti). And the point of Hot Frosty, so much as there is one, is meringue-light fantasy fulfillment, other than the fact that Jack does not know how to kiss or ask Kathy on a date. But he is a quick learner, eager to cook dinner and fix the house, gets along with everyone and, again, never wants to wear a shirt. They don’t make real snowmen like this anymore!
The only issue is that the sheriff, Nate (Craig Robinson, clearly having a ball), is a caricature of a cop trying to make a name by arresting the mysterious long-haired “streaker” seen about town. Robinson and his deputy (Joe Lo Truglio) enliven Hot Frosty with a comically overdone good cop/bad cop routine and extremely arbitrary bail costs, a necessary addition given that there’s not much to Jack besides … abs and Elf-life cheeriness (he, too, prefers straight sugar, along with ice cubes).
But never fear – though Chabert stirs some feeling as a woman who already witnessed one man die and might have to see another literally melt to death, Hot Frosty is overwhelmingly ridiculous cheer. It delivers on most everything one could hope from a movie called Hot Frosty: adults attending a middle school dance just because, a Lindsay Lohan Mean Girls/Falling For Christmas reference, a woman shouting: “What can I do? You can’t defibrillate a snowman!” and the single ugliest snowflake necklace I’ve ever seen in my life.
I’m as much a skeptic as anyone of Netflix’s penchant for framing movies as “content” for priming audiences to view films as cheap and disposable, but there’s little to hate on here. It’s a sincerely stupid idea executed sincerely, with seemingly complete buy-in from all involved that yes, this is a movie about a snowman with abs. I’ll take that type of brain freeze, for now.
Hot Frosty is now available on Netflix
