I got my first post-relaunch suggestion to the suggestion box a week or so ago:
Hot Frosty – it would only be a year late!
Hot Frosty is the title of a 2024 Netflix Christmas film starring Lacey Chabert (Gretchen Weiners from Mean Girls) and Dustin Milligan (Ted Mullens from Schitt’s Creek). I assume the suggestion was to review it—I would have asked for clarification, but alas the submission was signed only “Anonymous”. A true Christmas mystery.
Whoever “Anonymous” is, they clearly aren’t familiar with this blog’s history: in my post about moving to Edinburgh in 2020, I wrote:
I am not an entertainment critic, mainly because I’m easily satisfied with a show, so most of my reviews would have been “Yeah, I enjoyed it”.
Then again, since then I have been to 146 Fringe performances,1 and I certainly can’t say that “Yeah, I enjoyed it” described my reaction to all of those.2 So maybe “Anonymous” does indeed know what they’re talking about.
Certainly, my expectations were low, despite some friends of mine raving about the film. (Hmm, perhaps we have a clue as to who made the submission? Nah, too obvious.) With those friends we have recently watched A Christmas Exchange, a film set partly in London and partly in Connecticut, but entirely filmed in Canada.3 It was an enjoyable viewing experience, but perhaps not for the reasons intended by the filmmakers. The plotting is curious, especially when, just as the male protagonist is about to get together with the female protagonist, he decides to pretend he’s someone else—presumably because he’s realised that the film he’s a character in has another half-hour to fill. There are also some delightful Cockney accents that would make Dick Van Dyke take a ball and chalk up the apples and pears to get away from them, and an implication that Leeds is a suburb of London—something that can just about be explained away as the character’s ignorance if Occam’s razor didn’t lead me to believe it was the writers’.
I’d also recently watched A Very Yorkshire Christmas—titled “A Very British Christmas” in the US, presumably because prospective audiences wouldn’t be able to say for certain where Yorkshire is.4 The filmmakers here could at least say that they knew where Yorkshire is—they shot most of it in Knaresborough, where it is also set. But, as a Yorkshire native, I object to the portrayal of my homeland: apparently steam trains are routinely used for transport, everyone is just as obsessed with hot chocolate as they are in American-set Christmas films, and a pop-up winter wonderland event they all go to has a distinct lack of “rubbish-strewn hallways” or “sombre-looking reindeer”. The cherry on the incongruous Christmas cookie was the scene where the grandma, who apparently slept through much of the 20th century, seems almost unable to comprehend how somewhere in Yorkshire could “becom[e] a mining town”.
So, even though Hot Frosty was set firmly on the other side of the pond, my hopes weren’t high for it. The best I was hoping for was something in the same so-bad-it’s-good genre as the others I’ve seen recently. And, true enough, the start feels somewhat cliché: a series of shots of our female lead’s house demonstrating its poor state of repair. I’d criticise the one that says “Call repairman today!” as a violation of “show, don’t tell”, but I’ve tared my obviousness scales to AVYC, where characters reveal their deepest thoughts and motives to the viewer via diary entries that they read out loud, so actually that’s fine.
I mention this because it summed up my overall response to the film, as we’ll see. But first, the plot (don’t worry, no spoilers): Gretchen Wieners (who, in this film, is called Kathy) is grieving the death of her husband, who was a handyman and so did all the repairs in their house. She is given a scarf from a second-hand clothing shop, and places it around the neck of a suspiciously hunky snowman made as part of the town’s suspiciously convenient ice sculpture competition. He comes to life, taking the name “Jack” from the clothes he steals so he’s not wearing only the scarf.5 Presumably the name, from a Doylist perspective, is a reference to Jack Frost? But this creates more questions than it answers: are Jack Frost and Frosty the Snowman the same person? Or is this the attractive relative of the snowman from the song, meaning his name is Frosty Frost? And where does Suzy Snowflake fit into all this?
Back in the narrative, Jack doesn’t really understand interpersonal relationships (think Buddy in Elf), causing Kathy no end of frustration when she ends up sheltering him from the overzealous sheriff (Craig Robinson) who is investigating the theft of the clothes. But he also displays a superhuman ability to learn skills from TV shows and online videos, first making a pizza for his landlady, then fixing all the things that need doing in the house. Again, this poses some questions. What if he’d turned on the TV and it had been showing a re-run of CSI? Would Kathy have arrived home to find her house cordoned off and dusted for fingerprints? How much blood would she have found if it had been Dexter?
If you want to pick this film apart, you can: how does a random guy with no ID and no background checks (because he doesn’t have a background to check) get a job in a school? Why does it take so long for law enforcement to work out that said random guy is the one who stole the clothes? What eldritch horror would have resulted had Kathy put the scarf on one of the snowmen whose representation of the human form was considerably more abstract?
But I’m overthinking this, and this isn’t a film meant to be overthought. It really did start as it meant to go on: there were more subtle ways to tell us about Kathy’s home situation than what they did, but, in the field we’re working in, there are much, much less subtle ways.
Hot Frosty is charming, the humour works,6 and the concept is reasonably original—even if some scenes take cues from other Christmas classics (e.g. It’s a Wonderful Life, in a scene too close to the end for me to say more). It wasn’t high art, sure, but nor can I savage it like I did the other two. And we already know what that means.
Yeah, I enjoyed it.
- You’re reading the blog of someone who used to get his phone out in a nightclub to take notes of what songs were playing, so he could add them to his playlist named after said club later. Of course I kept track. ↩︎
- I have written short reviews of most of them—an idea for a future post, perhaps? Although the second part of what I said then holds true: “Also they were almost all small shows put on by student groups or up-and-coming comedians, and so I’d have felt mean giving negative reviews even if they’d been warranted.” ↩︎
- Except for some stock footage which is occasionally of London, but often blatantly of Glasgow. ↩︎
- That’s fair enough—I only know where places like Iowa and Nebraska are because of a misspent youth playing quizzes on Sporcle. ↩︎
- Which, thankfully, is just long enough. ↩︎
- This is not intentional humour, but props to the subtitlers who bothered to describe one scene’s non-diegetic music as “comically sad”. ↩︎
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