Hot Frosty (2024) – Review Notes
Mike, I swear to God sometimes you give me silly-ass bullshit like what this movie appears to be just to see if I can make lemonade out of lemons that I seem like I’m allergic to. “Bratz” was one of these picks, as was “From Justin to Kelly.” And each time, you marvel at how serious I take my analysis, frequently saying “I can’t believe how deep you’re going into this.”
Well sir, that’s how I roll, so I hope you strapped yourself in for the most in-depth, thoughtful look ever at this “cultural event” – which is how you termed it in our last episode’s set-up when you practically SHAMED me for never having heard of it. For the record, this was no cultural earthquake that I had somehow missed. Looking at the numbers, it was definitely a hit for Netflix. It was their most-watched movie for a week and reached the top 10 in multiple countries. But I think the real phenomenon wasn’t the movie itself: it was everybody collectively discovering that Netflix had greenlit a romantic comedy called Hot Frosty about a six-packed snowman and then immediately making the same joke people always make when idiotically-titled movies arrive on Streamers: Just because someone thought up the title “Velocipastor,” “Llamageddon” or, you know, “Hot Frosty,” did they really need to actually make the movie?!
I went into Hot Frosty expecting exactly what Netflix was selling: a goofy Christmas rom-com about a magical snowman who comes to life and falls in love. As such, I watched it with my wife who is a total sucker for this kind of fare. Now, Carmen is a sophisticated, intelligent and articulate woman – maybe the most of all three of these qualities than anyone I’ve ever met. But every once in a while when we watch a movie together, she drops a very particular kind of observation that summarizes succinctly her disdain for the proceedings: “What THEE Fuck???” Carmen, lover of silly romantic comedies and unapologetically maudlin schmaltz felt this was a bridge too far, and you know what? She’s mostly right.
The film stars Lacey Chabert as Kathy and Dustin Milligan as Jack, the magically animated snowman. The setup is ridiculous, but that’s part of the charm. The problem isn’t that the premise is absurd. The problem is that the film sometimes seems unsure of exactly how absurd or heartfelt it wants to be.
Chabert, a veteran of teen movies like “Mean Girls” and, self-referentially, “Not Another Teen Movie” has apparently grown into this Hallmark movie star from 2014 on. She’s pretty solid here in the lead role as Kathy, a widow and small-town diner owner. She brings sincerity and warmth to the character and grounds the movie emotionally. My only criticism is that at times her thin-lipped, tight facial expressions feel a little limited emotionally. There were moments where I wanted just a bit more pliability to the lower part of her face, which seemed possibly restricted by facial work of that sort of thing. It makes me feel like an asshole to point it out, but it was distracting throughout the film – kind of a Kathleen Helmond-“Brazil” kind of thing that also strikes a nearly-unrecognizable Lauren Holly in this film. All that said,Chabert does carry the emotional weight of the film and manages to do a respectable job with the “comedic” elements when they arrive.
Dustin Milligan faces the film’s toughest assignment, and while he occasionally finds the right balance between sincerity and comedy, the performance ultimately feels miscast. He leans so heavily into ex-snowman Jack’s innocent, fish-out-of-water qualities that the character often comes across less like a dream boyfriend and more like a humanized Labrador retriever. You know Jack McBrayer fro 30 Rock? There’s an eagerness and goofiness to Milligan’s performance that reminds me of McBrayer and it undermines the romantic fantasy the movie is trying to sell. For a film called Hot Frosty, the biggest problem may be that its Frosty simply isn’t hot enough. It seems to me maybe Milligan was a bit of convenience casting on behalf of director Jerry Ciccoritti, a veteran TV-helmer that most-notably worked on many episodes of the much-revered show “Schitt’s Creek,” some of which starred Milligan. Also because the dude has, like, a zero BMI. Seriously.
As much as Milligan struggles, the supporting cast is all over the place.
Craig Robinson seems to approach the movie as if he’s starring in a broad comedy sketch. He’s playing the cliché small-town sheriff at maximum volume and approaching a streaking snowman with the same level of obsession that Principal Rooney brings to catching Ferris Bueller. Every minor offense becomes a test of his professional credibility. The joke is supposed to be that he’s treating what amounts to Hallmark-movie nonsense like a career-defining criminal investigation, but it’s never funny and instead, plays like a cartoon version of a well-worn trope.
As his deputy, The State-alumn Joe Lo Truglio (who you’ll know from everything from Role Models to Superbad) finds the sweet spot. He’s goofy, but he understands the balancing act required by the material. His performance fits comfortably between the emotional sincerity of the leads and the broader comedy surrounding them, unlike Robinson’s sheriff who is pretty much just over-chewing scenery.
One criticism I’ve seen online is people trying to apply real-world implications to the snowman premise. Questions about consent, identity, and other issues that the movie clearly has no interest in exploring and shouldn’t. Personally, I think criticism like this suggests malice where there isn’t any. This is a magical Christmas fantasy. The premise is inherently whimsical. Not every fairy tale needs to withstand a graduate-level ethics examination. Perhaps movies like “Little Things” earn that scrutiny, but Lauren Holly’s horny single lady in her 60’s doesn’t need to be called out for sexualizing someone with the understanding of a toddler. It’s just a dumb Netflix comedy, people.
That said, the movie does suffer from inconsistency. It often feels caught between being a broad comedy and being a sincere romantic drama about grief and healing. It never fully commits to either approach. The tonal shifts can feel awkward, and the internal logic sometimes changes depending on what the scene needs. There’s also basic inconsistency within the rules of what Jack, the snowman, (aka Hot Frosty) knows and doesn’t know. He knows how to speak and understands the words for everything, but he doesn’t know why we wear clothes instead of walking around naked.
What’s frustrating is that buried beneath the silliness is a genuinely touching story about loss. While it spends a whole sequence parodying the “getting ready for the big date” scene from “Pretty Woman,” even going as far as to use the Roy Orbison song as a needle drop AND having Kathy slam a jewellery case shut on Jack’s hand (UGH), it never full invests on the nuggets of truth centering the entire story. Kathy’s grief is the most compelling part of the film. The moments where the movie slows down and allows that emotional core to breathe are easily its strongest scenes. They suggest a much better movie lurking underneath the surface, and allows better – touching – performances from leads Chabert and Milligan. I actually felt some of the loss angle worked surprisingly well, and when Jack pulls away from their first kiss because he didn’t know how long he might be alive and didn’t want Kathy to experience loss again, I genuinely shed a tear or two. Yes, I cry at everything, even Hot Frosty.
The stakes are also surprisingly low. Neither the romance nor the town itself ever feels particularly threatened. Because of that, the finale doesn’t deliver the emotional payoff it probably should. The movie keeps hinting at larger emotional consequences but never fully commits to them. Yes, Kathy is suffering from loneliness after the death of her husband, but it manifests in this superficial way with her having let home renovations go unaddressed. Procrastination seems to be the heaviest weight she’s carrying, all because her deceased husband was Mr. Fix-it. She’s not really “lonely” in any classical sense – as a much-liked diner owner, she has the love of an entire town behind her for the duration of the film. And that’s partially why the pay-off of the film – with the town rallying behind Kathy and her hunky snowman when the Sherriff arrests him – carries no emotional weight. Were the town of Hope Springs divided or otherwise struggling in some way, the Christmas Magic of Hot Frosty could help it heal at the same time Kathy does. Instead, the townsfolk are present and oddly accepting of the weirdness of Jack’s snowman-to-hot dude transformation. It feels like the script stopped one revision short of figuring out exactly what it wanted to be.
Maybe that’s partly the reality of “Hallmark”-style content. These movies often feel designed around seasonal release schedules or timely news stories rather than long development cycles. There’s a sense that the concept came first and they raced to start filming to beat the arriving 2024 holidays. Director Jerry Ciccoritti and crew all seem to be trying to beat the clock to deliver a timely bit of pablum for the “are you still watching” crowd, and that bugs me a lot because I have a genuine soft spot for romantic comedies and what it takes to make a good one. In film school, a mentor of mine once described Romantic Comedies as among the most difficult movies to “get right” due to the rules they follow and the expectations audiences have for them. Ever up for a challenge, I even wrote and directed one myself years ago—More Than Money’s Worth, part of my Bent film series. Trust me, I know firsthand that writing a good romantic comedy is much harder than people think. Making two characters fall in love convincingly while balancing comedy, emotion, and pacing is an incredibly difficult trick. And when you rush it, you get things like “Hot Frosty” which conveniently can rest on its dumb-as-a-bag-of-snowballs plot as rationale for why it ultimately doesn’t work. It doesn’t need to be good because it’s about a snowman come to life, for fuck’s sake.
That’s ultimately where I land on Hot Frosty. I don’t dislike it. In fact, I kind of enjoyed it. It’s charming. It’s harmless. The emotional core works when the movie lets it.
I just wish it had trusted that emotional core a little more and pushed beyond being merely “a pleasant holiday distraction.” There was a better movie hiding in here, one about the healing power of Christmas Magic, that would have been far more effective had it actually had anything real to heal. Also, the fact that Jack becomes real when the scarf is finally removed from him, that’s ill-earned as the plot-dynamics never plainly state the magic of the scarf. Is it love-magic channeled through this gifted scarf that brought the couple owning the local shop together, or is it Christmas that does the work? The screenplay doesn’t care, and it ends up being a shrug instead of a genuine a-ha moment.
Bottom Five Hotties
When I first heard the topic “Bottom Five Hotties,” I immediately ran into a problem. The obvious version of this list is just five attractive people – usually women – who manipulate, murder, seduce, betray, or otherwise ruin the lives of the people around them. We could talk about Amy Dunne from Gone Girl, played by Rosamund Pike. We could talk about Elizabeth Hurley’s devil in Bedazzled. We could talk about Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin or Drew Barrymore in Poison Ivy. We’ve kind of done that list already with our “bottom five girlfriends” list and there’s a solid Venn diagram between our “bottom five assholes” and what this list could be.
So instead of making another countdown of dangerous ladies, I decided to interpret “hottie” in a variety of different ways, in what I feel is a list that’s much more akin to something you’d put together, Mike. Some picks are conventionally attractive. Some are not. What they all have in common is that they’re undeniably hot… and absolutely terrible news.
5 . Bee (The Babysitter) – Samara Weaving
Year: 2017
Director: McG
Bee is the one pick on this list that fits my traditional definition of a “hottie.” Samara Weaving is charismatic, funny, charming, and effortlessly likable, which is exactly what makes Bee so dangerous. She weaponizes every ounce of that appeal to manipulate a lonely kid into trusting her before revealing herself as the leader of a literal satanic murder cult. Most movie hotties break hearts. Bee harvests blood for dark rituals. It’s the difference between getting ghosted after a bad date and getting stabbed repeatedly while your babysitter tries to summon demonic forces. She represents the classic version of this list taken to its most ridiculous extreme.
4. Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) – Christian Bale
Year: 2000
Director: Mary Harron
If we’re being honest, Patrick Bateman is exactly the sort of man society labels a hottie. He’s wealthy, successful, physically perfect, impeccably dressed, and played by peak-era Christian Bale. The joke, of course, is that beneath the expensive suits and skincare routine lies one of cinema’s most horrifying narcissists. Bateman is the ultimate inversion of the femme fatale: a man so handsome and successful that people overlook every screaming warning sign imaginable. Christian Bale would eventually become Batman, but first he perfected Bateman—a man who proves that being hot and being a complete psychopath are not mutually exclusive traits.
3. Grendel’s Mother (Beowulf) – Angelina Jolie
Year: 2007
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Robert Zemeckis spent millions of dollars and some of the most advanced motion-capture technology of its era attempting to digitally recreate Angelina Jolie’s sex appeal, only to wander straight into the uncanny valley. Grendel’s Mother is supposedly irresistible. The film treats her appearance like the ultimate temptation. Yet she looks less like a living person and more like a high-end department store mannequin that gained sentience and moved into a cave. She has a golden body, snake-like features, and a permanent expression that suggests someone forgot to finish rendering her face. The entire premise hinges on Beowulf being unable to resist her, and every time I watch the movie I think, “Kill it! KILL IT WITH FIRE!” Or you know, that giant ass sword next to her. So this is my example of the hottie that’s not actually a hottie at all.
2. The Atomic Bomb (Oppenheimer)
Year: 2023
Director: Christopher Nolan
For a brief period in human history, no hottie was more sought after than the atomic bomb. Entire nations poured unimaginable amounts of money, manpower, and scientific effort into pursuing this thing. Brilliant minds devoted their lives to unlocking its secrets. Rival countries desperately raced to possess it first. And what was the reward for finally getting together with this hottie? The ability to annihilate civilization. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer spends three hours chronicling humanity’s obsessive courtship with the most dangerous hottie ever conceived – focusing on steely-eyed Cillian Murphy’s hottie-with-a-heart of coal, Robert Oppenheimer as the protective father of the nuclear age, a daughter everyone wanted to take out until she dropped in unannounced in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The atomic bomb is the ultimate toxic relationship: everyone wants it until they realize what living with it actually means. As such, it belongs at number 2 on my list as that most desired hottie that we should just stay the Hell away from at any and all costs.
1. The Sun (Sunshine)
Year: 2007
Director: Danny Boyle
At approximately 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit on its surface and millions of degrees at its core, the Sun is literally the hottest thing in the solar system. Ever. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine asks an important question: what if the thing that keeps us alive suddenly stopped doing its job? The entire film revolves around humanity trying to rekindle this dying hottie before it takes everyone down with it. Unlike every other entry on this list, the Sun doesn’t need manipulation, murder, or psychological abuse to be dangerous. Its mere existence is lethal. Get too close and you’re dead. Get too far away and you’re dead. Lose its affection and the species goes extinct before the Earth is left a cold, dead rock drifting lifeless in the universe. That’s not a hottie. That’s the most high-maintenance relationship in the history of the universe, and a primary example of a hottie that holds you captive and will never let you go, until it does and it kills you.