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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Kate McCusker

‘I couldn’t look away!’ The rapid, runaway rise of ridiculous Christmas romcoms

He is topless in a snowy garden, with woollen scarf
‘People see the absurdity in this one’ … Dustin Milligan as Jack, the ‘hench snowman’, in Hot Frosty. Photograph: Netflix

I could summarise the plot of Hot Frosty – the surprise Netflix hit that has a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score – but it’s probably better put by 32-year-old Christmas film obsessive Claire Birrell. “It’s about a snowman that comes to life and it’s Ted from Schitt’s Creek and then this woman falls in love with him even though he’s only been alive for 24 hours and has the IQ of a three-year-old.” Did she enjoy it? “I couldn’t look away,” the Edinburgh-based estate agent tells me. “It was a wild ride.”

Currently cresting the Netflix Top 10, Hot Frosty is on track to become an outsized festive hit for the streamer, alongside 2022’s Falling for Christmas (Lindsay Lohan as an amnesiac heiress) and 2020’s Holidate (cynical Emma Roberts brings a fake boyfriend home for the holidays). If you’ve managed to miss Hot Frosty, it stars Lacey Chabert – a longtime Hallmark hall-of-famer – as a widow who falls in love with a snowman who has recently transmogrified into a man with a six-pack and a chin-length bob.

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