The only thing
that is more annoying to me than Christmas encroaching more and more on
Thanksgiving's territory each year is people complaining about Christmas
encroaching more and more on Thanksgiving's territory each year. With that in
mind I thought I’d give in and watch a new Christmas movie… in November. I saw
that Craig Robinson was in a new one called Hot Frosty, and hey,
the guy who played Alexis's boyfriend in Schitt’s Creek is in
it too! Neat. How bad could it be?
Hot Frosty is pretty bad! But
you might be into that for all I know?
The gimmick of Hot Frosty is
fun enough on the surface. Christmas movie veteran Lacey Chabert plays a
widowed lady who brings a snowman to life with a magical scarf, but unlike the
many times this has happened before in fiction (and hopefully just in fiction)
the snowman is hot. It’s allegedly supposed to be one of those cute
fish-out-of-water romcoms where a hardened realist has her heart melted by a
naïve newcomer that teaches her to love again, but the love story is bland and
the stabs at comedy frequently made me want to hide my face in vicarious shame
and embarrassment.
Jack (the snowman played by Dustin Milligan
of Schitt’s Creek who might be hot if his hair wasn’t
distractingly bad) is no Olaf or Buddy the Elf. What he knows and doesn’t know
as someone who essentially just popped into existence isn’t consistent, nor are
his moments of ignorance amusing. And just like with Buddy the whole “I’m an
innocent baby man-child who falls in love with a grown person” thing is a bit
disturbing in its implications, especially when he is getting oggled at by the
elderly.
Craig Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio (Brooklyn
Nine-Nine) seem to have a little bit of fun in their roles as the local
cops, but even they can’t make most of the moments work. As for Lacey Chabert,
well… as stated earlier, a quick IMDb search told me that she has been involved
in a lot of Christmas movies, and I can’t imagine that her roles in those were
in any way different than the character she played here. That being said she
did fine.
I did chuckle a couple of times, truth be
told. There was a reference to Mean Girls (which Chabert
starred in back in the day) that was pretty good. And the movie is short.
That’s… that’s pretty much it for the good parts of Hot Frosty. Other
than that the film doesn’t rise above the most mediocre of your typical
Hallmark-esque holiday fare, cast aside. If you need to know how bored I was,
just know that this was the first review I actually finished writing while
still actually watching the film. That’s not a great recommendation, is it?
But hey, it’s still plenty early in the
season, and Hot Frosty didn’t kill my pet or anything. If
you’re a connoisseur of cheesy Christmas movies you might not hate it. As my
mom said when we were done, “It was a perfectly adequate bad Christmas movie.”
Hot Frosty is now available on
Netflix.
This review was first published in the
Keizertimes on November 22nd, 2024. Visit at www.keizertimes.com
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