Being Film #29 for Hooptober 2021
Back when I was a teenager there were these things called video stores. But I didn’t live in the most urban of areas so instead we would rent our VHS tapes from pharmacies and gas stations. Sometimes these places didn’t have the most popular movies, especially in the horror genre so I would up finding a lot of shoe-string budget films that took advantage of videotape as a cheap alternative to film. These films weren’t too good, and that trend seems to have continued into the digital age with Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, which looks like a slightly higher res version of those dumpster films. With a title like that I think you can guess what this film is about and, more importantly, how it goes about it. Cheap, silly, a few laughs…but there’s only so far you can go with a wise cracking killer snowman – although every time I see a crawling talking carrot the movie bumps up a minute.
THE QUICK SUMMARY: Mutant killer snowman Jack Frost is back to take revenge (see how the title works?) on the lawman who put him away in the first movie. You’d think this would be a problem since said lawman is vacationing with a group of lovely ladies in the Caribbean, right? Wrong! Jack Frost apparently has the power to manifest without succumbing to the heat? Maybe? I don’t know – I never watched the first film and am just assuming the coffee that was spilled into his anti-freeze prison in the film’s opening gave him the power to be moderately amusing and kill people.
As terrible as Jack Frost 2 is, at least the film knows it, and steers into the gross out gags and humor. The deaths are weird and splatter-silly: in one instance jack Frost is hiding in a tree trying to drop razor sharp icicles on a young woman, only to keep missing. His solution? Drop a massive snow anvil on her, crushing her. This is what Jack Frost 2 aims for, and if you get get in tune with it, you’ll find some fun.
The humor is pretty low-brow: just wait until you get to the part where he turns into ice cubes for the model to use to, uh…”perk up” during her photo shoot. Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman has its charms, even as it plumbs so pretty dumb depths.
Cinema Dual 