In short: Jack Frost (1997)

Thanks to small town sheriff Sam (Christopher Allport), hard-travelling serial killer Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald) has finally been apprehended. When he’s being carted off overland to his place of execution, a nice murder/accident combination involving a crash with a truck carrying a mysterious “genetic material” turns the killer into a living, moving snowman in the traditional style. Well, actually, he looks and moves a bit (a lot) cardboard-y, but let’s not speak ill of a guy who has the sartorial sense to pop in a carrot nose (please don’t ask what he’s going to use it for later, sensitive reader) and all the other accoutrements of his new status as killer snowman. Except for the top hat, alas.

As luck will have it, all of this happened just inside the borders of the town Sheriff Sam polices, so Jack’s right away getting started on killing people in absurd – what else would one expect of a killer snowman – ways. He’s planning to visit Sam and his family eventually. Just before the town is cut off from the rest of the world by the mandatory snow, a rude special agent (Stephen Mendel) and the usual whiny and possibly slightly mad scientist responsible for whatever turned Frost quite this frosty arrive as a rather dubious kind of cavalry. But as we all know, one can’t keep a good US small town down. Particularly one armed with hair dryers.

As my frequent imaginary readers know, I’m not terribly fond of films that have their tongues planted quite this firmly in their cheeks, nor do I have much love for films that go the “see, we know that this is bad, but it’s bad on purpose, so it’s actually good” route. So by all rights, I should hate Michael Cooney’s Jack Frost. Curiously enough, I don’t. Now, it may be the charitable spirit of the season taking possession of me, but watching this, I quickly and repeatedly found my mouth twitching into that strange facial expression humans call a “smile”; sometimes slight guffawing followed; there may even have been a bit of actual laughter involved. Why, it’s as if the film’s jokes are actually repeatedly funny, and as if Cooney hides a rather great talent for comical timing under the surface of the film’s ironic badness. As a matter of fact, the film as a whole is rather well paced, with every little comical and absurd little set piece actually pulling the simple plot forward.

Even better for my tastes, the film demonstrates a fine understanding of how a traditional cheap shoddy horror movie about a rampaging small town monster works, and adds, between the more obvious bits of nonsense, some really clever twists on the formula. I found myself falling a bit in love with Jack Frost’s sense for the deadpan, too, for while there’s a lot of goofy absurdity going on, it plays a lot of these scenes wonderfully straight (which of course only increases the absurdity of the whole affair), often pretending it is a perfectly straightforward little B-movie, yes sir! So expect very serious hair dryer fights, and an inspired scene in which the scientist explains that Jack’s turning into a killer snowman through SCIENCE(!) is proof of the existence of a soul.


I don’t know about that, but Jack Frost the movie certainly has one.

Straight Into Darkness (2004)

It’s the tail end of World War II. After a a mine accident kills the MPs bringing them in, deserters Losey (Ryan Francis) and Deming (Scott MacDonald) are making their way through wintery Western Europe, ending up somewhere behind the frontlines. The very different, yet both traumatized men – Losey being more the soft and thoughtful type, and Deming abrasive and violent – encounter the detritus of war: corpses, ruins, and people having taken on the appearance of both. Eventually they end up in a half-ruined building that turns out to be the base of a very special guerrilla group – a bunch of mentally ill or developmentally handicapped children that have been taught the ways of war by their former teachers (David Warner and Linda Thorson).

Shortly afterwards, a troop of Nazi soldiers (including a tank) appears, and the two deserters and the child soldiers and their minders have to attempt to fight them off.

Straight Into Darkness’s director Jeff Burr has spent most of his career making second row genre movies like Pumpkinhead III or Puppet Master 3 and 4. I imagine this sort of work doesn’t exactly provide one with the opportunity to bring much of one’s personality into a movie – and it’s probably not something the producers involved would want a director to provide in a post-Corman-when-he-was-good world. On the positive side, if that sort of work doesn’t kill you, it must give you some of the chops needed to get a cheap, more personal project rolling sometime.

The film at hand – as far as I’ve read partially self-financed by Burr -clearly is such a project, and even though the slightly lower than you’d wish it had budget leads to some rough edges, it’s quite a success too. It’s a war film that turns things slightly surreal and gothic, with the outward world having gone so crazy and cruel it’s not clear anymore if it is mirroring the characters or the characters are mirroring it. With simple yet effective measures, and some classic montage techniques that I found a bit heavy-handed in their symbolism from time to time (but then that’s montage for you), Burr brings the irreality of the horrors surrounding his characters to life, portraying a world that has come completely unhinged. Despite there being no supernatural element here, there is an air of the Gothic and of the horror genre about Straight Into Darkness, using war movie tropes to make a horror film where we are the monsters, and we have driven the world and each other insane; or possibly it’s the other way around, genre-wise.

Despite being rather on the dark side (as promised by the title), Straight Into Darkness is philosophically not opposed to small traces of optimism, and the suggestion of a better future, but it is also willing to be honest about the fact that most of its characters won’t make it there, and not all who make it might deserve it if looked at morally, as it is about the fact that people will even find an excuse to make to themselves for slaughtering children (while others lose all faith in themselves for things they just couldn’t have avoided). In fact, the film’s so consequent about these things in its final act it’s not just impossible to imagine this done with even a minor mainstream budget; even I found the final twenty minutes or so pretty hard to take, but then, that’s not the film being needlessly cruel or transgressing to be transgressive but the film achieving what it set out to do. Being easily digestible in this case would mean lying to the audience to make it easier on them, and, as a wise woman once said, art isn’t supposed to look down.

(The film also gets extra credit for having post-dubbed its German soldiers by actual native speakers speaking actual German; they’re not particularly good voice actors, but the mere fact the film is doing what most major studio productions don’t is a swell example of how much the film cares about what it does).

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