When the trailers for Hot Frosty—a film about a snowman coming to life at Christmas to romance a struggling widow—dropped prior to the holiday season, the brief seemed clear enough: Let’s take something wholesome (a vague sense of the Frosty the Snowman tale) and make it horny. No, much hornier than that. Keep going. This isn’t for Hallmark, we don’t have to be coy about it. He’s a snowman with a sixpack, created from a sculpture at the center of town, and he comes to life naked. With a scarf.
Something something thumpity… thump thump? (Look at my sense of self-respect go. O’er the hills of snow….)
I thought it would be good for a laugh, so my partner and I cued it up a couple weeks back. Sometimes the best way to get into holiday mode is via absurdity, right? In any case, I miss the romcom heydays of my youth—even the bad ones. Often especially the bad ones. Maybe Hot Frosty would bring a little of that old magic back…
…I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
There is something very wrong with the world Hot Frosty occupies. In fairness, it not just one overarching something, but a slew of smaller issues that coalesce into a much larger sense of inherent wrongness. And perhaps I should start with the town of Hope Springs, New York: A quaint snowy hamlet that lives in terror of its law enforcement.
But not in a realistic sense, of course—that would be too heavy for magical Christmas fare. This is terror of law enforcement in a lighthearted, chuckling way. An aw-shucks Americana way. A “take that one guy from The Office and that other guy from Brooklyn 99 and everyone will know we’re being cute” way. My only assumption can be that the folks creating this film think we’re still living in an Andy Griffith Show-watching era where local town sheriff shenanigans are labeled as endearing. There are a few retro hints that lend credence to this theory—our heroine, Kathy Barrett, owns a cafe in town that has an extremely vague ‘50s-ish diner feel to it, for starters—but there’s not enough cohesion to make that feel like a deliberate choice.
Hot Frosty (who goes by the name Jack in the film for boring reasons) is born in the usual manner: He is sculpted for a snowman-building competition at the center of town by no one we ever meet, and is brought to life via a magic scarf that Kathy leaves draped about his shoulders. As the only snowperson who in any way resembles a living human being in this display—the rest are just regular boulder-stacked snowfolks—we have to assume that he was modeled off someone the sculptor knows. This is not relevant to the story in any way, but if you’re like me, it will linger in the back of your mind throughout the entire film. Where is the man whose face (and abs) Jack has borrowed? Doesn’t this create an incredibly wacky consent issue?
Digression, sorry, I’ll get back to the plot.
Jack comes to life in the middle of the night, naked, and stumbles through town crashing into things—one being a shop window (of the place owned by the couple who gifted Kathy the magic scarf) where he grabs a pair of galoshes and coveralls. We later learn that Jack doesn’t know much of anything, and also that he can’t get cold on account of still being a snowman, so why he feels the need to dress himself is actually a very good question that the film neglects to answer. Unfortunately for Jack, he did accidentally streak in front of an elderly couple. (The wife is fine with this because all older women are randy menaces in this world, which is something else that the film also neglects to comment on.)
When Kathy sees a confused, under-dressed guy with incredible arms talking to snowpeople the next day, she assumes there’s something wrong with him and brings Jack inside the diner to feed him. When her friend suggests that they get Jack some help by calling in the law, Kathy’s immediate response is, “We can’t tell Sheriff Hunter. He overreacts to everything.” She then proceeds to tell a story about how the sheriff once arrested someone in their local movie theater for “excessive candy unwrapping.”
Haha. Everyone laugh, it’s a funny joke!
But it’s about to get a lot worse, you see, because Jack did break a store window and streak naked through the center of town. Sheriff Nathaniel Hunter heads into Reclaimed Rags, the store with the shattered pane, and tells the unconcerned owners that he will find the perpetrator because everyone knows he’s tough on crime. They offer to take him out to breakfast, which mortifies him—they’re trying to sway his investigation! When they ask why they would want to do that, he makes up an elaborate plot about them breaking their own store window for insurance money. He also likes to ad-lib a blues song about fighting crime that he plays on his keyboard down at the police station. His deputy Ed Schatz’s primary job is running around after him, telling the denizens of Hope Springs that he knows the sheriff is a little over-zealous but they are just trying to help and obviously everyone can trust him.
Hilarious!
As all of this is ramping up, Kathy has a brand new problem: Jack purports to be in love with her and won’t leave her side. Her doctor pal Dottie is pretty sure Jack is a snowman come to life on account of his impossibly low body temperature, so Kathy keeps the guy in her house and tells him to lay low so the sheriff doesn’t find his smash-and-grab culprit. When Jack is persistent in his declarations of love, Kathy shuts him down and explains that saying you love someone over and over robs the phrase of its meaning, which is a helluva belief to lob in there and never really challenge in your romantic comedy.
It’s hard to blame Kathy for cutting Jack off for a couple reasons; for one, she happens to be recently widowed and is clearly still grieving her husband. Her house is full of dozens of fix-it projects that she doesn’t tackle because her husband was the handyman and she can’t bear to do these things without him. (This is partly useful because her house has no heat, making it the perfect haven for a snowman who cannot handle moderate temps.) But also… Jack is basically a child. He has no past to draw on, and no knowledge of the world. He picks things up quickly—he figures out how to make her pizza from scratch by watching one program on TV—but he is effectively a blank slate.
This is where the limits of the original story butt heads against romcom clichés. It’s fine for Frosty the Snowman to be a childish blank—he’s supposed to be hanging out with children and having fun playing games. And it’s common for romantic leads in romcoms to have misalignments in their views of the world—but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to make the love interest a male version of the “born sexy yesterday” trope.
Jack’s reason for wanting to stay with Kathy? “Technically I’ve known you my entire life.” He then pouts sadly until she decides to bring him home. And sure, Jack immediately starts picking up the slack in Kathy’s life by learning (far too many hyper-specific) carpentry skills off the TV. He makes her dinner and asks her about her life. He respects every boundary she creates, including her dislike of hugging and her mandate not to say ‘I love you’ all the time. But he also needs to be told all those little things like: “We don’t change [clothes] in front of people, we wait until there’s no one around.” And he greets Kathy in the morning by admitting that he wandered the basement last night and wants to know “What’s cancer?” after finding paperwork about her husband’s death. You know, the way a five-year-old asks mom about a word they don’t understand.
How do you fall in love with a person who literally needs you to parent them through all their basic knowledge of the world? I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (it absolutely does), but who is fantasizing about it? That’s what romcoms are, right? So where’s the fantasy? The film even seems aware of the strangeness it’s created, to the point where Jack gets a job helping at the middle school, and when Kathy comes to get him and asks what she’s doing there, he replies all seriousness: “You’re picking me up from school.” So there’s a joke here, clearly, but I can’t figure out what makes it funny.
And don’t forget, the real terror here is Sheriff Hunter and his obsession with law and… conspiracy? He actually suggests that this “crime spree” is being masterminded by the town’s mayor in the weeks leading up to the sheriff’s reappointment. See, he’s angry with Nate for towing his car a few times, once while he was delivering gifts to a children’s hospital. (We never meet the mayor, by the way.) The sheriff walks around town uttering gems like “I do not tolerate funny business,” and “There is nothing more dangerous than blatant disrespect for law and order,” and redoing catchphrases while removing his sunglasses for cinematic effect. Every time he does this, someone in town makes a snide remark, or Deputy Schatz comes up behind him and makes excuses. Kathy is terrified of Jack getting found out, but he’s too busy becoming everyone’s local handyman and making people happy.
Eventually the sheriff gets his evidence (off a camera from a bank ATM, a thing which takes him ages to consider), and arrests Jack in front of an entire party at the diner on Christmas Eve. He sets the bail at $2000 and ignores Kathy’s pleas over the heat in the station. You see, Sheriff Hunter finds that Jack has no fingerprints, which means that he must be a sleeper agent? (Of where and for whom? It’s clear that Sheriff Hunter doesn’t care.) He tries to claim simultaneously that Jack is in full control of his body, but also sweating like mad because he’s scared that he’s been caught. The entire town has to stand on the precinct steps and gather bail money, and the sheriff still doesn’t listen until his own son contributes to the pot.
The town is on Jack’s side because he’s made their lives better—by being nice and handy, and also hot, of course. And while this finale makes it very obvious that Sheriff Hunter should be on some form of serious medication for paranoia, the rest of the town quickly accepts that Jack is an actual snowman once Dottie backs Kathy up on it. So maybe there’s just something in the water up here.
Of course, Jack was in the heat too long and seems to be dead once they drag him outside (and the sheriff suddenly changes his tune to “I didn’t believe, I’m so sorry” like that makes up for something), leading to a desperate little monologue from Kathy and a kiss goodbye. Jack resurrects, but this time as a human boy with a normal body temperature. But he’s still has no history. And probably looks like the person his sculptor modeled him after. And the sheriff is forgiven by his town for being a little kooky, having learned nothing much. And Kathy embarks on a new life with a brand new guy who used to be a snowman, and she’s okay with that.
There are a few utterances in the movie of “Christmas magic” that are clearly meant to make up for all the strangeness, but no amount of Yuletide chintz can fix this. The town of Hope Springs bills itself as a place rich with small town charm—but the sheriff thinks he’s a half-step away from starring in his own action film and makes it everyone’s problem. The very real grief over the death of a loved one gets usurped by holiday shenanigans. And that empty place in our heroine’s life is supplanted by a partner with the worldly understanding of a toddler and the body of an underwear model.
I’ll pass, thanks. Take me to a different upstate town with weird holiday magic. I’ll cross Hope Springs off the map and never return.
