Defector Watches A Christmas Movie: ‘Hot Frosty’

This is the time of year when the the best, biggest, and most ambitious movies come out. Not Oscar season, but rather that stretch when the halls of streaming services are decked with the brightly lit, thinly disguised advertisements that are the year’s new Christmas movies. There are more than 100 new Christmas films to watch this holiday season, and whether that number horrifies or excites you depends upon how much of a freak you are for the festive. Sabrina is proud to say they are a real Christmas freak, and this year they asked some of their colleagues to watch some of the most, uh, available new holiday movies. The first movie in our lineup is Hot Frosty, Netflix’s romance between a human woman and a magical snowman with abs.

Sabrina Imbler: I am very grateful to both of you for taking a chance on this idea and watching perhaps the film of the 2024 Christmas movie season: Hot Frosty. Before we get into it, I wanted to ask if each of you could share more about your relationship to Christmas movies, good and bad. Had either of you heard of Hot Frosty before this?

Ray Ratto: I don’t do much by way of Christmas movies, and I have never seen any of Hallmark’s massive collection of cinematic triumphs –the benefit, I suppose, of having never been part of a desired demographic. Thus, I go in with an uncluttered mind in both genres, and without all the noxious prejudices I wanted to bring to this project.

Patrick Redford: Unlike Ray, I live for this Yuletide lifestyle. I’ve made people watch the Muppet Christmas Carol a whole bunch of times, I’ve Grinchmaxxed, and have watched A Charlie Brown Christmas enough to come around on kind of loathing it. But the whole time, season after season, an unacknowledged gap in the canon grew. Holiday cheer is one thing, but finally Hot Frosty asks and answers: What if Frosty was a 10/10 smokeshow with an eight-pack? I’d never heard of it before you suggested it, Sabs, but I’m glad I watched, and I think this was the perfect assignment to kick this series off.

RR: Well, I’m overmatched.

SI: Patty, I think you’ve clued in on the key question of Hot Frosty: What should a hot snowman look like? I was admittedly hoping they would get freakier with it, finding a way to eroticize the traditional three-sphere tower that we’ve come to associate with snowpeople. Spheres are sexy! But the sexy snowman of Hot Frosty looks like a regular man both in flesh and in snow, down to his photorealistic ice nipples. Did both of you find the snowman hot?

PR: He was honestly a bit too vascular for my taste, but he definitely hit the aesthetic mark of “Netflix original Christmas cinematic universe hot,” which the movie hinges on. Also, he was lowkey a criminal, which is badboy-coded.

RR: This is the first moment I started losing the plot – the fully naked (I presume) snowman in the town square of a quiet Midwestern town with a psychotic policeman. I got lost in details like that until I figured out the real take here—tell a story devoid of nuance that lasts only 93 minutes. At that moment, I embraced the concept as the format demands rather than based on my gift for pedantry.

SI: At the beginning of these 93 glorious minutes we meet the woman of every snowman’s dream: Lacey Chabert, a.k.a. the Other Mean Girl. Apparently Chabert has been in more than 30 Hallmark Christmas movies, giving her the tenure required to tackle such a weighty role as a widow who accidentally brings a sexy snowman to life with a magical scarf. She is living in this quiet town in a house without any heat—literally creating the perfect situation for a man made of ice to walk into her life. She is the one to drape the magical scarf over Hot Frosty and make him flesh and blood. Although, kind of confusingly, when the snowman is a human he remains the temperature of ice, leading to a running gag where he is constantly perspiring in all indoor situations (and ultimately culminating in tragedy). What did you make of the physiological mechanics at play here?

RR: I could have used a bit of puddling on the floor here and there to sell the concept, but I suppose the budget didn’t cover that. His essential gormless personality, though, allowed me to speed through such a tiny detail that I moved on to my next question—how trusting can one person be? Maybe a puddle would have made it too obvious.

SI: I would have loved to see Lacey Chabert fall in love with a sexy puddle (with photorealistic nipples, of course). Gormless is a great word here, Ray, and brings me to the question that haunted me throughout the flick. Frosty, who dubs himself Jack after the name on the first piece of clothing he steals, has presumably spent his entire, fleeting life as lumps of snow. When he becomes human, he knows how to speak English but nothing of such customs as clothes, utensils, or television. He exists in the body of a 30-something but in many ways has the mind of a child. Is it ethical to date a snowman who has the body of an adult but who has only really been alive for a day?

PR: Defector’s tour of #AgeGapAutumn continues here. I think a hallmark (buh) of the schlocky Christmas genre as such is the deus ex machina of Christmas Magic, a super convenient writing device that allows the creators to get the audience to suspend any disbelief because things just happen around Christmas. So in that spirit, I was ready to take the movie on its own terms. Is she gonna smooch that be-nippled puddle, who is scarcely older than a snowy zygote? Sure, what the hell. 

Speaking of ethics, the thing that surprised me here, even if it was somewhat incidental to the point of Hot Frosty (actually, points, two; the nips), was the movie’s ACAB-style politics. The inciting incident is a broken window! There’s retail theft panic! You can’t get more direct than that. I did not realize until looking up the lyrics to “Frosty The Snowman” that running afoul of a local cop is in the original lore, and I was wondering what each of you made of Craig Robinson’s bumbling, oafish sheriff as villain? 

RR: I thought he was more oafish than bumbling. He wanted to be on Law & Order Hope Springs, and played up the rigid humorless part with the proper (given the genre) two-dimensional stupidity. Also, as soon as we learned that Lacey was a widow, the choice of the town name, Hope Springs, was about as subtle as a flounder to the face, which I found increasingly delightful as the film progressed. No time for nuance here, kids. Gotta get to the point.

SI: Patty you’re blowing my mind. I didn’t even think this movie was a lyric-by-lyric adaptation of Frosty the Snowman, despite having seen the movie Last Christmas, which is a lyric-by-lyric adaptation of the song “Last Christmas.” I was glad to know Frosty was antifa, and that the sheriff chasing him around town was a pretty irredeemable, oblivious cop (who still took the time to paint the county jail the colors of Christmas?) who clearly would be better off pursuing a career in musical improv, not law enforcement. And you’re right, Ray, Chabert’s character as a widow was as one-dimensional as the town. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is when Hot Frosty goes into Chabert’s basement to discover a medical file, inexplicably in a font best described as a knock-off of Marker Felt, explaining her late husband was receiving chemotherapy, only to cut to Hot Frosty’s shocked face.

PR: God, the reveal of the font in the cancer file was the funniest (unintentional?) joke in the whole movie. Something like “He has cancer 😢 But he’s doing chemotherapy ✊ Prayers up 🙏” would have been as dignified.

SI: If they panned down further on the medical file, I swear the last line would be “He died 😭”

One of the most disappointing parts of this movie to me was that Hot Frosty had absolutely zero chemistry with Chabert. I found their connection inappropriately icy. This was strange given that Hot Frosty’s chemistry with the rest of the townspeople was off the charts. He flirts first with a hot MILF in a car, and then a group of her ravenous-looking friends. To me, the real love story of this movie was Hot Frosty’s flirtation with the deputy sheriff, a shy man who clearly experienced a sexual awakening when confronted with Frosty’s charm. Sparks flew around them as Hot Frosty complimented the deputy’s lower chest and fashion sense, leading the deputy to confess it’s “been a minute” since he kissed a woman …To me, they were OTP.

RR: I think we just solved the mystery of the decorations around the cop house. And as far as Lauren Holly (said MILF) goes, driving her car into the snow and then visibly (seemingly, anyway) orgasming in the driver’s seat as Jack humps it out of the snowbank was very clearly when the plot turned. At age three days, he became an expert in DIY and a dirty thought in other people’s minds. That’s precocity on another level, and suggests that he was universally sexy to middle-aged women and deputies alike.

PR: Yes! The only actual frisson of hotness was between Hot Frosty and the deputy, and also the MILFs. A much better version of this movie would have involved Chabert bringing him back to life and trying to smooch him only for Hot Frosty to leverage his hotness by sleeping with everyone in the whole town, but I suppose the permissible amount of horniness of Netflix has to be contained within the unit of the nuclear family. If you’re going to call the movie Hot Frosty, you should let him rock.

RR: Snowman as cad—a tale as old as time itself.

SI: One night with Hot Frosty could make Craig Robinson’s sheriff hang up his badge.

Sadly, Hot Frosty spends his sexless days doing various unpaid labor for mostly total strangers, as well as for Lacey Chabert, further complicating the dynamic between them from mommy-son to boss–indentured servant. If Hot Frosty has never heard of credit cards or private property, he definitely has not heard about the exploitation of the worker under capitalism. 

RR: And even in this mythical town, who allows a stranger who just popped into town out of nowhere around middle-school kids? This movie is more and more twisted the more we look at it.

SI: That’s a good point, Ray. Hot Frosty is immediately given unfettered access to the local middle school, where he also chaperones the dance and takes Lacey Chabert as his date. This scene pissed me off because it was ostensibly this romantic moment between the snowman and his maker, but was functionally two adults flirting and slow-dancing at the center of a middle school dance. The movie clearly takes place at some time in the recent past—all the cars are boxy—a time when the entire purpose of middle-school dances was for the kids to dance in freak trains. But no freak trains were had because these two adult freaks insisted on edging each other on the dance floor.

PR: I’m reading “no freak trains” in the Marker Felt chemotherapy font. And yeah that was a strange moment, I suppose the purpose of that scene was to show that the two leads are attracted to each other but Hot Frosty’s melting moment was supposed to convey the impossibility of their love? I did appreciate that Hot Frosty’s little buddy turned out to be the sheriff’s son, that was a nice touch.

RR: Since we’re discussing medicine, what with the doctor going straight to a “He’s a snowman come to life?” diagnosis after just taking Hot Frosty’s temperature. This is a particularly hilarious bit of quackery, suggesting that her medical diploma has been written in glitter pen. 

SI: And in Marker Felt. I low-key loved that doctor. Did she have a medical degree? Who’s to say. Was she around, reachable, and essentially on-call for a snowman without health insurance? Absolutely.

PR: Selling Sunset’s Chrishell stuns in new dramatic role! Speaking of HF’s snowmanity, another totally baffling and somehow charming scene was the bit in the diner when Chabert’s character is like, “Wait … is he a magic snowman?” and the whole town, in unison, is like, “Girl, duh.”

RR: And let’s not forget the well-established medical practice of dumping a dying man on the ground and hoping for the best. I don’t remember who suggested that, but I’d wager it was the doctor, after looking at the street signs and checking when the public works people were supposed to plow the streets.

SI: This brings us to the heartwrenching climax of Hot Frosty, where the snowman has been seized into police custody in front of his chosen family. He experiences a medical crisis in the unsustainable heat of his (inappropriately festive) jail cell, only to be rescued when the town bands together to bail him out. Once the sheriff’s son, and Hot Frosty’s little buddy, chips in the final $10, Hot Frosty’s limp, lifeless body is lugged out to rest on a heap of snow in front of the county jail. At this point, as Ray said, the doctor no longer has any medical advice to offer, and the time comes for Lacey Chabert to declare her love for this maybe-dead, maybe-snow man. Honestly this scene was dark!

RR: And yet our refrigerated felon’s recovery was so swift and sure that he agreed to go to Hawaii of all places. It went from grim to joyously madcap in no time at all. Surely he would have had enough residual snowman to suggest Norway, or at least Alaska. You don’t go that native that quickly. And if not him, then surely Doctor Blind Guess would have intervened.

PR: Forcing Chabert to relive the trauma of losing her husband before the revival was wrenching, even if he was obviously going to come back to life. To me, the spiritual climax of the movie was the scene immediately preceding Hot Frosty’s death and rebirth, when the whole town chipped in to his bail fund. If we are going to extend the probably specious reading of this movie’s anti-cop politics, they do offer an eventual synthesis. When power is abused, and a person deemed subaltern by the state is victimized for that status, the only way through is mutual aid and community rigor. Again, this is maybe incidental, since the purpose of the movie is to provide a Kohl’s commercial-style frictionless experience to put on TV around the holidays for people to occasionally look up from their phones at, but even so, there’s a weirdly complete arc here, and I found myself fascinated to follow it through the movie. ACAB = At Christmas, Abolish Boys-in-blue.

SI: Maybe the real spirit of Christmas is abolition, and a perfect set of nipples.

RR: I’d buy all that if they didn’t go out of their way to redeem the sheriff by providing him one more turn at the keyboard in front of the cop house. My guess is that the ultimate heroes here will end up being all the older ladies who helped band together, save 32-Degree Boy, and bring down the man. Gray Lives Matter!