It’s been over 20 years since cartoonist Peter Morley-Souter invented the only rule of the internet everyone actually agrees on: Rule No. 34, which says that if a thing exists, there is an X-rated version of it. It was true then and it’s true now. But I think the time has finally come to tack on an important addendum: Rule No. 34A: This also applies to Christmas movies.
Made-for-TV Christmas movies actually have a lot in common with adult entertainment. They’re cheap, they hit the spot and there’s more than you could ever possibly watch in one lifetime. And apparently you can make them about literally anything. So a film like “Hot Frosty,” a Netflix Original holiday rom-com about an extremely boinkable snowman, should be nothing more than a drop in the bucket. It even stars Lacey Chabert, who together with Alicia Witt, Danica McKellar and Candace Cameron Bure has starred in — you can trust me on this, I ran the numbers — eight billion Christmas movies.
But none of them are quite like “Hot Frosty.” This isn’t because the movie is about Lacey Chabert falling in love with a sexy ice sculpture played by Dustin Milligan, who’s best known for “Schitt’s Creek” and once directed the post-credits rap video for the 2011 killer shark movie “Shark Night” (which was better than the movie “Shark Night”). It’s because this movie is, unlike the rest of the overwhelmingly chaste films in this subgenre, incredibly horny. There’s a scene where Lauren Holly (“Dumb and Dumber”) gets her car stuck in the snow and the shirtless sleetcake asks questions like “You want me to get behind you and push?” and “Are you ready for me?” before she revs her engine and moans with satisfaction. Hallmark would never.
Also “Hot Frosty” is a cancer allegory — but we’ll get back to that later.
“Hot Frosty” stars Chabert as Kathy, who runs a diner in a small town called Hope Springs. Every year Hope Springs hosts an ice sculpture contest, and this year one of the entries is a strapping stud with bedroom eyes and a six-pack. Kathy, whose husband died a few years ago, puts a red scarf on the snowman and he magically comes to life, naked except for the scarf, which is so precariously taped to his crotch that it also qualifies as “Christmas magic.”
The snowman, who calls himself Jack, gets in trouble at first. He streaks through the town and has to resort to thievery to clothe himself. But soon he’s in Kathy’s house, making her ham pizzas, fixing her roof half-naked, and — because it’s a Netflix Original and this is the law — watching other Netflix Original movies on Netflix.
Will Kathy and Jack fall in love? Yes. Will the town’s two wacky cops, played by Craig Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio, briefly get in the way of their romance to artificially raise the stakes in a narrative that’s otherwise devoid of conflict? Yes. These are not the important questions that “Hot Frosty” asks of its audience. The important questions are about cancer.
“Hot Frosty” was written by Russell Hainline (“The Santa Summit”), and when he wasn’t writing absurd dialogue like, “Since the dawn of time Christmas fairy tales have often included a snowman coming back to life,” he was taking his premise weirdly seriously. The story of Frosty the Snowman is about a magical being that knows he’s going to melt, and soon. There is a real-world analogue for this, and that’s having a terminal illness. Hence, Kathy’s husband dying young, and her packing up their old life and hiding it away in her basement.
Which itself leads to the film’s other brilliantly absurd line of dialogue, and quite possibly the strangest thing any actor has said in 2024 (sorry, “Megalopolis”): “OK, so earlier today I was checking the house for vampires and I went downstairs. What’s cancer?”
“What’s cancer,” indeed. Jack doesn’t have cancer, but he is dying. He’s destined to melt, which will leave Kathy alone and grieving again. So he wants to make the most of the little time they have together. And look, “Hot Frosty?” Can we talk over here in a parenthetical for a second? (My dude, You did not need to go this hard. Or maybe you did, but this is not the type of “going hard” we expected from a sexy snowman movie. Why are you making us feel this really big thing? Actually let me rephrase: Why are you making us feel this really big emotion?)
“Hot Frosty” could have been awful and gotten away with it, coasting to ratings victory on irony views alone. And in some ways it really isn’t very good. It’s cheap and it’s silly and it has a laughable premise that some people will mistake for terribleness. But it’s also winking and whimsical. It knows what it’s doing and it’s doing it on purpose. Somehow it actually kind of works. Chabert could do this role in her sleep, so her professionalism is not surprising. It’s Milligan who comes out of nowhere. He brings an innocent, doe-eyed quality to this sexy half-naked iceman that makes him easy to love, and makes all the jokes easy to swallow.
Then again it’s easy to swallow a lot of “Hot Frosty.” The film’s director Jerry Ciccoritti (“TekWar: TekJustice”) finds a good balance of romance and ridiculousness, and he keeps ribaldry flowing. There’s so much ribaldry. This may be the only Christmas rom-com where you know for a fact half the characters are pleasuring themselves every time they’re off-camera, because they’re turned on by a snowman. (If it’s not, you have to tell me the name of the other one.) It’s almost certainly the only sexy snowman rom-com that’s also a metaphor for cancer. And I’d bet my corn cob pipe that it’s the only one that gets away with it.
