Hot Frosty is the most ridiculous, terrible Christmas movie of the season

Tis the season for carelessly-plugged plot-holes and terrible scripting, and ‘Hot Frosty’ is our pick of the bunch.

My toxic trait is obsessively watching Christmas flicks for the entire month of December. 

And I’m not talking about the classics. Sure, I’ll get into a good rewatch of Elf with the best of them. The Holiday is an undisputed giant in the field.

But this particular Christmas kink depends on watching the most low-budget, poorly-acted, sickly-sweet-storylined Hallmark examples I can get my hands on. 

Luckily, the Netflix algorithm has my back, and this year, it’s produced one of the greatest specimens of the genre in recent history: Hot Frosty.

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Hot Frosty is the most ridiculous, terrible Christmas movie. Image: Netflix

About Hot Frosty

Starring Lacey Chabert of Mean Girls fame, it has all the ingredients you yearn for in a truly awful Christmas flick: a small, charming town in Middle America, a closed-off widow and a touch of chaos-creating Christmas magic sprinkled across the lot. 

The premise, if you’ll indulge me, is this:

Kathy (Chabert), a sad, lonely woman who lost her husband years beforehand and is just trying to muddle her way through the festive season, goes to the annual town snowman-building competition. 

She brings with her a scarf, gifted to her from a well-meaning local busybody, who has informed her that this very scarf brought about a meeting with the man who ended up being the love of her life. 

Bit insensitive, seeing as the love of poor Kathy’s life is lying in the town cemetery, but I accept it as a plot device. 

While there, Kathy encounters a strangely muscle-bound and lifelike snowman, around whose sinewy neck she wraps the scarf.

She snaps a picture with her phone, and the Christmas magic imbued in the fabric of the scarf somehow activates via the phone’s flash functionality because FAST FORWARD TO THE NEXT MORNING and the strangely in-proportion snowman has suddenly come to life, naked in the streets of the twee little village. 

Jack, the snowman (played by Schitt's Creek’s Dustin Miligan) was clearly cast during the peak of our fervour for ‘rat boy summer’, as he expertly embodies the vibe of a hot rodent with a six pack. 

Introducing... the chiselled snowbae

Thanks to the fuzzy logic crucial to all ill-thought-out plotlines, the chiselled snowbae somehow ends up moving in with Kathy, after a visit to the local doctor that confirms every worst fear you’ve ever had about America’s healthcare system when his temperature is confirmed to be “lower than it is possible to survive” and the doctor simply sends him home with the stranger who dragged him in. 

Thus begins the process of Kathy, with her shrivelled winter heart, falling for the frankly adorable Jack, who, having literally been born yesterday, has all the street smarts of a golden retriever puppy. 

Putting aside for a moment the issues surrounding consent when it comes to being wooed by a man who doesn’t know what a date is, the chemistry between Miligan and Chabert is far more mother-and-child than friends-to-lovers, but given that the poor dude has never even tasted solid food before coming into her custody, perhaps that is to be expected. 

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The snowman who lived. Image: Netflix

The wardrobe department, clearly operating on a budget of $17 at Target, seems intent on reinforcing Chabert’s - an objectively beautiful woman - lack of sex appeal, wrapping her in cardigans and bootcut jeans circa 2002.

Meanwhile, in spite of Jack’s extraordinarily buff body, he does nothing to live up to the titular promise of the film, possessing less rizz than Saint Nick himself.

You know you want the two main characters to kiss - if only so the movie limps across the finish line to its finale - but the thought of them getting naked together is absurd. Perhaps it’s a nod to the conservative Christian propaganda so often thinly veiled in these types of movies, but as one friend wisely observes: “the only casting prerequisite for one of these Christmas flicks is that the two main characters have absolutely no sexual chemistry at all.”

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It's so bad it's good

Without wanting to spoil the ending (although, fair warning, there are no Sixth Sense-style twists at its conclusion), rest assured that you could watch this movie while actively playing a game of Twister and still predict every scene, with the exception of a truly enjoyable Lindsay Lohan/Mean Girls cameo that made me cry “YES GIRL!” out loud.

While it remains a mystery as to how such drivel could have achieved the Netflix cut-through that it did, it should absolutely be at the very top of your watch-list this holiday season. 

Because in the year of our Lord 2024, surrounded by grim global news and the impending burnout of the Christmas mental load, who doesn’t need an obscenely-muscled living snowman to take the edge off?

Originally published as Hot Frosty is the most ridiculous, terrible Christmas movie of the season