(Sorry, Puccini.)

At this time of year it can feel like being caught in some kind of contracting loop, with the space between festive seasons gradually shrinking. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was working in an office in Japan, we jovially suggested to one of the secretaries that taking down the Halloween decorations and putting up the Christmas tree were two activities that should be separated by a comfortable gap – now it almost feels like leaving the tree until the start of November marks you out as an incorrigible sluggard.

The fact that made-for-TV Christmas movies now start infesting the schedule in October probably adds to this effect, of course. There are whole channels devoted to what sometimes feels to me like the cinematic equivalent of knotweed: not in the right environment (Christmas movies should start screening no earlier than the 10th of Dec, with the possible exception of Die Hard), serving no good purpose (who in their right mind wants to feel Christmassy before the clocks have even gone back?), and aggressively spreading to colonise the entire habitat.

And yet people must watch this stuff or else they wouldn't keep making it (that, or people are now such compliant consumers they'll just swallow what's in front of them without demur). Possibly making it an easier sell to the average audience is the fact that many of the newer kind of pappy Xmas movie are so extravagantly, knowingly stupid that I can imagine it's quite possible for people to watch them, look at each other, and smile about how ironic and clued-up they are being.

Current and recent notably stupid Xmas films include The Knight Before Christmas (Vanessa Hudgens falls in love with a hunky time-travelling warrior from medieval Norfolk), The Princess Switch (another hit-job on The Prince and the Pauper in which two Vanessa Hudgenses swap places and both get hunky boyfriends), Holiday Touchdown (hunky footballer-pop star coming-together with technically no actual involvement by Taylor Swift, but), Falling for Christmas (Lindsay Lohan plays a rich heiress who discovers romance and the true meaning of Christmas after falling off a mountain and becoming amnesiac), Holiday in the Wild (recently dumped woman finds romance while nursing baby elephants in Zambia on a winter break), and The Most Colorful Time of the Year (optometrist helps hunky colour-blind schoolteacher understand the meaning of the season; there is, surprisingly, romance). But currently dominating the spotlight in this particular arena is Jerry Ciccoritti's Hot Frosty.

Jerry Ciccoritti is, um, let's call him a journeyman, who started off in low-budget horror (promising titles like Psycho Girls and Graveyard Shift (not the Stephen King version)), before a pivot towards TV movies about Shania Twain and other prominent Canadians, then a brief stint in cosmetics-related thrillers (Killer Hair and Hostile Makeover), before finally settling into the pappy Xmas movie rut. Sorry, I mean groove.

So: Hot Frosty is so aware of its place as a second- or third-order piece of culture that there's even a bit at the start when a narrator genially informs the audience that, yes, they've seen films like this before, but this one is going to be different (it's actually not unlike Damsel, another Netflix film, in that respect). Anyway, we are in Smalltown USA just before Christmas, where we get to meet Kathy (Lacey Chabert), who owns the local diner. The shortcomings in Kathy's own life and her unhappiness are robustly symbolised by the fact her roof leaks, her heater doesn't work, and there's a hole in the floor, but she's just too sad to do anything about it (if Hot Frosty is a movie with a feminist subtext, it's one which operates within extremely limited parameters).

Kathy's kindly older friends give her a gift for the holiday season: it's a very possibly magic scarf which they just happened to come across by accident. The next thing you know (this is only a 90-minute movie so they can hardly hang about) Kathy is checking out the results of the snowman-building competition in the town square, where she finds someone has gone to the considerable effort of sculpting a snowman with realistic musculature, hair and nipples, not to mention at least an eight-pack (his pack may extend into double figures, but the camera remains coy). Who the hell would do something like this? Well, obviously, it's� the magic of Christmas. At least that's the only available answer.

Kathy sticks her scarf on the absurd snow-sculpture (he's hardly an actual snowman) and goes home, leaving the magic of Christmas to turn it into a half-witted but eternally good-natured male model who calls himself Jack (Dustin Milligan, who it turns out was actually in Slither, many moons ago). Jack runs around the town for a bit, his naked audacity catching the attention of many older women, before stealing some overalls and settling down to wait for Kathy to come back.

And, obviously, the town doctor goes all in on the he's-a-magic-snowman theory, based on not much more than his inhumanly low body temperature, and sends him to live with Kathy. Soon he is fixing up her house and cooking for her (you can apparently learn anything from watching TV), being taken to the hearts of the people of Smalltown USA, and threatening to defrost Kathy's sad and frozen heart. All the while trying to dodge the attentions of the tyrannical sheriff (Craig Robinson, one of those people who's a very steady worker but hasn't quite broken through to international stardom), who wants to arrest him for indecent exposure.

And it is, if we're honest, intergalactically goofy and dumb, with what feel like intentionally generic performances from most of the cast and never much doubt as to how exactly the whole thing will pan out. Watching it should feel like trying to eat a rubber pizza, for this is surely the worst kind of cynical mass-produced holiday guff – there's the mandated moment of wistful sadness when Kathy remembers her dead husband, but the rest of it is so cutesy and jolly and sugary it nearly gave me a medical episode. (Although there's a clip from Murnau's Symphonie des Grauens on the TV at one point, which I obviously enjoyed.) Milligan's performance as the melty man of all the women's dreams is really like what I would imagine would happen if you got Nicolas Cage to play Tim Nice-But-Dim from the old Harry Enfield TV show.

There is very little here which is genuinely good or watchable in a non-ironic way. At any other time of year I would be decrying it as the terrible, terrible film it is. And yet such is the state of the culture these days that, horribly, I found myself sitting back at the end and going 'Heh heh, that wasn't too bad, it passed the time in a mildly amusing way.' As a result, this is a Christmas film which has filled me with shame and self-disgust, which even Die Hard has never quite managed to do before. So I suppose it has that to distinguish it, if this genuinely is a distinguishing feature worthy of note. Normally I would say we need to be vigilant and supportive of each other to stop this sort of thing becoming normalised, but to be honest I fear it may already be too late. Merry Christmas.

Awix

09.12.24 Front Page

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