Hot Frosty

“Hot Frosty” does not officially cite “Frosty the Snowman,” the 1950 song written by Walter Rollins & Steve Nelson and first recorded by Gene Autry, as inspiration, but draws from it, nonetheless, expanding some of its elements in greater detail while simultaneously retaining a winking sense of ambiguity. “You just buy that he’s a snowman?” asks an incredulous Kathy (Lacey Chabert), the snowman’s requisite love interest, when she summarizes the strange goings-on for the town folk gathered before her. Sure, they all essentially respond, why not, wryly evincing how the script does not get bogged down in dumb details. The snowman is alive! What else do you need to know?! As esteemed former member of the radical West German Volksfrei movement Hans Gruber once observed, Christmas is “the time of miracles.” 

Crucially, the snowman in director Jerry Ciccoritti’s movie does not remain a snowman, not like the 1969 animated TV special, but transforms from an anthropomorphic snow sculpture of a man into an actual man, nay, hunk, a Hot Frosty, as it were, christened Jack, played by Dustin Milligan with long hair and frequently no shirt, his conspicuously popping veins making him look like a lighter weight Olympic weightlifter. He inadvertently runs afoul not of a traffic cop as in the song, but an overzealous sheriff played by a game Craig Robinson as a comical version of “Cool Hand Luke’s” Boss Godfrey crossed with “It’s a Wonderful Life’s” Mr. Potter. Is “Hot Frosty” Capraesque in so much as it seems to be arguing for strength in community and against the overreach of the state? Or does it shrewdly write its sheriff off as a Bad Apple as not to offend? And is it folly to ascribe intent to a Netflix Christmas movie? 

Anyway, “Hot Frosty” is less concerned with injecting meaning than heat, in a manner of speaking, between Kathy and Jack. Trouble is, Jack is both written and played by Milligan as too much of an innocent, and in betraying her Hallmark Channel roots, Chabert is too sanitized and sentimental, as their scene at a middle school dance, of all places, inadvertently evokes, where they come across less like consenting adults than an overgrown kid and a chaperone and, oh my god, did the editors realize this midway through but know they had no choice other than pressing on? On the other hand, “Hot Frosty” occasionally breaks the genre’s church bake sale-type mode with some PG-13 flavor in recurring double entendres and comically compromised positions between Jack and the older Jane (Lauren Holly). “Can I give you a push from behind?” he asks when helping remove her car from a snowbank. The scene ends with an, eh, humorous climax, and I was left to wonder if all these made for TV Christmas movies are akin to the Victoria era, a prudish surface masking so many primal urges just below.