On the 26th September 2021, screenwriter Russell Hainline posted on Twitter: “Just had the best idea for a Hallmark Christmas movie holy sh-t holy sh-t holy sh-t.” On the 13th November 2024, Netflix released the end result of this tweet: Hot Frosty. Mr. Hainline’s tweet made allusions to Hot Frosty being a Hallmark movie – a made-for-television product of the Hallmark channel, usually riddled with romantic cliche while being formulaic to the point of comfort – but it is a Hallmark movie in a similar way to how Wes Craven’s 1996 film Scream is a horror movie. Both are constructed as standard entries into their respective genres, but they have a satirical irreverence to them that is both indebted to the genre and bemused by its very existence.
Hallmark movies are essentially fairy tales for grown-ups. They are comforting fantasy, the equivalent of a hot chocolate by the fire. You know what it tastes like; you know what it feels like. Directed by Jerry Ciccoritti, Hot Frosty has all the trademarks of a Hallmark movie: a grieving/broken-hearted protagonist in the form of widow Kathy (Lacey Chabert) who owns a small restaurant business (this is usually a florist, or a cafe, perhaps a bakery) in Hope Springs, a small town bustling with a smattering of quirky locals, while a love interest arrives to disturb and improve the life of the reluctant protagonist. But, as the opening narration promises, “fairy tales have never been told like this.”
That is because the love interest of Hot Frosty is a snowman. Not your standard trifecta of snowballs and carrot nose, but a came-to-life snow sculpture of a muscular man, where each of his abs have been finely carved out like a horny Michelangelo chiseling out his statue of David. After a scarf imbued with the magic of Christmas is draped across him by Kathy, and a swirl of mystical snow, this frozen Adonis comes to life as naive, doe-eyed Jack (Dustin Milligan). It is as silly as it sounds but Hot Frosty approaches this, and the genre, in a winking, subversive manner.
Take the poster. If you put ‘Hallmark Christmas film posters’ into your favourite search engine, you’ll see a red/green colour scheme and the romantic stars placed central. As observed by film critic Rafa Sales Ross, the Hot Frosty poster inverts these colours by gender, where it is the male star in red and the female star in green. When Jack comes to life, an EDM version of Tchaikovsky’s ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy‘ plays. The song from The Nutcracker is a staple of Christmas whimsy. At every turn, Hot Frosty is both predictable and unfamiliar. It wants you to be cosy enough to enjoy its simplistic hot chocolate charm but be absurdly surprised like choking on a forgotten marshmallow. For instance, when Jack – whom Kathy lets stay with her – emerges from the basement, having read the ridiculously fonted doctor’s notes of her late husband, and asks, “What’s cancer?”.
It’s a curious line. As with all fairy tale-esque fantasy, it asks us to suspend our disbelief – how can he read, walk, talk, cook, clean, bake, craft? Some potent magic in that scarf! – but this line highlights a layer of subtext. As with every magical snowman story, the clock is ticking like it’s in a Salvador Dali painting. Jack is melting. For all intents and purposes, Jack is dying. Slowly. The script asks you to liken this to the cancer of Kathy’s late husband. The aforementioned reluctance of Kathy – especially in comparison to the thirsty, ravenously under-satisfied townsfolk who lust after the hunk – makes sense when you prescribe this idea that she can’t let herself fall for Jack, who will soon die like her husband did. It’s a truncated version of every Hallmark conflict but one that feels odd and different and in its own roundabout way…new. An attempt at an allegory is, at the very least, worth praising.
Hot Frosty seems to consistently want to break the rules of Hallmark movies. Hainline’s instinct to laugh at his original concept must have contributed in making the script be so subtly tongue-in-cheek. In Scream, the original Halloween plays out on a screen as a meta-commentary on slasher film ideologies. Hot Frosty uses the Lindsay Lohan starring Falling For Christmas as this metatext, having Kathy comment that she went to school with a girl just like the character Lohan plays in the film.
For those who can’t put together the reference, Chabert and Lohan both starred in 2004’s Mean Girls. This is not exactly breaking the fourth wall but putting just enough pressure for it to crack, much like Scream does. Even the casting of Chabert is an impudent, flippant decision, as the actor has made Hallmark movies her bread and butter. This meta-gaze towards the genre becomes all the more apparent when the credits roll, and the little snowglobe of a town is revealed to be a movie set by a retreating camera.
Even the antagonist of the picture is the ‘long arm of the law’, which feels like a response to contemporary matters of police brutality and their authoritative overreach. When Jack comes to life, he steals some clothes to avoid being a naked man with his genitals out, casually hidden by the extra-long scarf (that darn magic scarf). The sheriff (Craig Robinson) and his lackey Ed (Joe Lo Truglio, in a Brooklyn-Nine-Nine reunion) abuse their power throughout the film as they search for and try to impugn Jack on his theft, even after he returns the garments once Kathy dresses him appropriately. This critical lens placed upon the police is a subversion of the genre, as it is an idea predominantly allotted to action films or dramas.
That being said, even through many subversions – a posse of lusty female retirees, a happily subservient male character, or a third act that discusses love not as romantic but as a necessary component of healthy community – there is still a distinct sense of dated conservatism that comes with its straight-laced Hallmark satirisation. For all its innuendo, and subtextual references to self-pleasure that may have occurred off-screen, Hot Frosty is far too PG (literally, in the UK, as the film was given a PG rating) for the story it wants to tell. Hainline’s script seems to be written like a Wattpad entry of a seven-year-old who can only imagine what adults get up to behind closed doors (a whole lot more than kissing!). This sexy-snowman-comes-to-life tale is fun for all the family, for some reason, when the target demographic of these films probably engage with more risque fantasy. Raise your hand if 365 days is in your Netflix queue.
Hot Frosty is a fascinating watch. To see the genre be twisted and pulled like a Christmas cracker, while still maintaining the essence of what people want from Hallmark-style movies, is the little plastic toy nestled alongside the dad joke. If films are to be reviewed and arbitrarily marked, it should depend on the success of what they attempt rather than what we should expect from them. In good faith, what Hot Frosty sets out to do is exactly what it does. It matters not that every viewing of this should come with Lactaid. It is cheesy, gooey fare that is only ever serious when it comes to its assertion on earnest sincerity and above its capriciousness lies something sweet and charming, which is exactly what it wanted to be.
Hot Frosty is now playing on Netflix.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch, on the Netflix site.
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