Jack Frost

Alternate titles : Maniac Snowman

Tagline : "He's Chillin, and Killin!"

Not to be confused with the Michael Keaton family film of the same name, this campy horror comedy revolves around a serial killer, Jack Frost (Scott MacDonald), who's being transported to his place of execution, when his prison bus collides with a tanker full of chemicals from a genetic research lab during a snow storm.

Attempting to flee from the bus, he gets hit with a wash of chemicals from the tanker, which melts him into the snow. However, it seems that Jack hasn't just dissolved. As soonafter, the nearby town of Snowmonton find they have a killer snowman on the loose. But with the town being the snowman capital of the world, it looks like the local Sheriffs office is going to have its work cut out, trying to find out which one is Jack. But how do you kill a snowman?

Featuring a whole slew of ridiculous death scenes, including sledders being decapitated with their own sledges, people being strung up with Christmas lights and shot with icicles, the film is exactly what you'd expect from a low budget horror comedy of this nature.

The most hilarious scene though surely has to be the where a Jack pops up in the bath, whilst a pre-American Pie Shannon Elizabeth tries to take a shower and appears to get crushed to death, until you realise the carrot from his nose is "missing" (lets just say Christmas "came" early)!

Extremely daft and campy, which makes no attempt to disguise its low-budget B-movie trappings, the film is a laugh riot and most definitely falls into the "so bad its good" category and would like to recommend this to all horror B-movie lovers.

Overall Marks :

Terrifying Trivia

• According to Writer/Director Michael Cooney, Renny Harlin was interested in Directing the film and turning it into a big budget horror. However, his girlfriend Gina Davis, apparently talked him out of it, as she thought the script was awful and wanted him to make Cuthroat Island. The script was subsequently picked up by Prism entertainment, who were interested in making it as a low budget production, and asked Michael Cooney to Direct it himself.
• The movie was filmed around the city of Big Bear Lake in California, a popular tourist resort for skiers. But unfortunately, when the crew went there to shoot, they found themselves in the middle of a month of unseasonably warm weather, and no snow. As a result, they had to use fake snow in the background of each scene and use a lot of close up shots, so you couldn't see the lack of snow in the background
• The film's budget was a mere $500,000 and was shot in just 18 days.
• This marked the feature film debut of Shannon Elizabeth, who's probably best known for her role as Nadia in the American Pie movies. She also starred in "Scary Movie", "13 Ghosts", "Cursed" and "Night of the Demons".
• Christopher Allport, who plays Sam the Sheriff, ironically died in an Avalanche whilst skiing in 2008.
• The snowman was designed by horror special effects artist Screaming Mad George..
• For the scene where Jill (Shannon Elizabeth) is killed, when Jack Frost pops up in the bath. On the first take, his carrot nose poked her in the eye as he slammed her up against the wall, so they decided to remove it. This had the unfortunate effect that Jack's carrot was 'somewhere else' as he repeatedly slams her body against the wall in the finished scene...
• The Greek release was titled "Maniakos Hionanthropos" which translates as "Maniac Snowman".
• The film was shot on leftover scraps of film reel, as they could obtain these quite cheaply because the budget was so low, they couldn't afford afford to buy new film stock.
• The scene where the Sheriff grabs Jack Frost and jumps through an upstairs window with him and lands in the back of a pick up truck, was shot in one take using multiple cameras.
• The film got into distribution difficulties, as Prism pictures went bankrupt during production and the bank seized the rights to the film as collateral. As a result, the finished film sat on the shelf for some time, until they could find a distributor willing to take it off their hands. A-Pix entertainment eventually agreed to buy the rights and the film became a huge hit on home video. But unfortunately, none of the actors in the film got any royalties from it, as their contract was with the original distributor, who were no longer in buisiness.

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