Take a seat, dear reader, and get ready for a tale. A tale of a lonely, hot, young grieving widow who spies a hunky snow sculpture, six-pack abs and all, in the town square. She senses that this snowman is missing something and wraps her scarf around its sculptured neck.
Well, there must have been some magic in that scarf because….well, you get the idea. Hot Frosty is exactly what the title suggests: a Christmas romantic comedy about Kathy (Lacey Chabert), a comely widow, and the ripped himbo snowman named, naturally, Jack (Dustin Milligan) that comes to life. If the premise of Hot Frosty sounds like a joke movie one would see in another movie, you’re not far off.
Hot Frosty began as a joke. Russell Hainline, who wrote the script, talked about how he wrote the title down and giggled endlessly at its silliness. But the pandemic had ended, and like all of us, he was wrestling with stuff, and the idea wouldn’t leave him alone. Hence, Hot Frosty snowballed into a goofy comedy about a small town rediscovering the magic and wholesome thirstiness of the holidays.
Directed by genre alum Jerry Ciccoritti, Hot Frosty never takes itself all that seriously; it’s a Netflix Chrismas movie, after all. Yet, there’s a heart underneath all the horny silliness, innuendo, and blushing older ladies. What makes Hot Frosty so enjoyable is how Ciccoritti and Hainline lean into the absurdity while also giving Chabert and Milligan actual characters to play.
Hot Frosty is a movie in which, when the town discovers that Jack is actually a snowman who has come to life, someone explains it away by throwing their hands up in the air, “It’s Christmas!” It’s a refreshing attitude for a modern movie to take. I’m sure the plotcels would wring their hands but they were never going to enjoy a movie about magic, Christmas or otherwise.
Most of the film is an excuse for a romp through the small New England town of Hope Springs. Kathy, a widowed owner of the local diner, is feeling down. Her house is in disrepair; one of her steps has a hole, the thermostat is broken, and there’s a leak in the roof. However, aside from that, it’s still a pretty nice house. But it’s about the metaphor of how Kathy is broken and needs fixing.
What better way to fix a lonely Lacey Chabert than to have a naked Dustin Milligan dance around the town square? Hot Frosty gets a lot of mileage of women seeing a naked or shirtless Milligan and gasping, ogling, and needing a fainting couch. It’s the kind of randy humor we’d get in Grumpy Old Men. Only here, the characters aren’t nearly that old.
The scene where Jack comes to life is rife with visual innuendo. My favorite is how the camera starts at the bottom of the sculpture, where it’s a solid block of ice as it slowly makes its way up to the finely sculptured torso. The camera almost winks at us but implies that it knows what’s in that solid block. Funny enough, no one seems all that curious about who built the snowman or why they chose to make him an adonis of ice rather than three giant snowballs.
Anyway, once alive, he dances around the town square in nothing but his magic scarf. That scarf is magic indeed, as it somehow always seems to hang in a way that covers Jack’s frosty bits. I suspect it’s more CGI than practical, but to Ciccoritti’s credit, he tries to get away with showing as much of Milligan as good taste allows.
There’s a moment where Lauren Holly, playing one of the locals, spies the shirtless Milligan and crashes her car. Jack, being a kindhearted sex symbol, offers to help the besotted woman. In scenes like these, Eric Cayla’s camera plays up the cartoonish aspect of Hot Frosty. The interior shot of the car perfectly frames Milligan’s abs, or the way Ciccoritti, Cayla, and editor Julia Blua cut back and forth between Milligan and Holly as he tries to rock the car free from the snowbank. Hainline’s script is filled with suggestive dialogue, and it feels like something ripped from a romance novel. That’s not a bug; that’s a feature.
However, Hot Frosty isn’t solely concerned with Chabert gasping in shock and awe whenever she sees Jack topless. There’s a subplot about the town’s overzealous sheriff, played by Craig Robinson, and his goofy Barney Fife sidekick, played by Jo Lo Truglio. Jack causes no end of chaos and destruction and the two men are hot on the trail of the mysterious stranger.
Hardly a crime spree, Robinson’s sheriff is on the case nonetheless. The citizens of Hope Springs find him more annoying than anything. At one point, he boasts that during his tenure, there hasn’t been a single murder. “There hasn’t been a murder in Hope Springs for 100 years,” someone cries out. “You’re welcome,” Robinson shouts back.
Hot Frosty has a Frank Tashlin-adjacent vibe to it. The way they play with the idea that Jack is constantly cold but making all the women around him uncomfortably warm, for example. Yet, despite the cartoonish elements, Chabert gives a textured performance. Her Kathy is struggling with a lot, and for a movie that is essentially Lacey Chabert is so hot she brings a hunky snowman to life; she finds a way to craft a real human being in a world where none should exist.
Chabert is no stranger to these movies, nor are Hainline, Ciccoritti, Milligan, or even Greer. Hainline’s script is sprinkled with references to other movies, some obvious, others less so. While I usually grate at the notion of extended universes, I giggled at how Hot Frosty went about it.
Milligan, like Jack, is sometimes playing it too broad and childlike. But that could also be Hainline’s script trying to find the balance between naive and man-child. Still, even with his Joker-like grin, he has a wonderful, sexy Tasmanian Devil energy about him. To a point where you can see why Chabert’s Kathy would be both attracted to and confused by him.
Jack spreads cheer and eye candy while trying to teach Kathy to love life and herself again. Hot Frosty is a Christmas fairy tale that understands that there’s no problem too big that can’t be solved by true love’s kiss, even if it’s between a shapely widow and a studly snowman.
Images courtesy of Netflix
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