Cage match! ‘Hot Frosty’ vs. blockbuster Christmas movies
Dozens of holiday-themed movies debut every year, where names like Candace Cameron Bure and Lacey Chabert carry more weight than Sydney Sweeney and Timmy Chalamet.
In 2024, however, big screen veterans like Dwayne Johnson, Ben Stiller and Jack Black want in on the Christmas Movie Renaissance. Can any of them make a better movie than Chabert’s latest Netflix juggernaut?
In America’s fourth-most popular Coeur d’Alene Press recurring entertainment column, Chabert’s Netflix film “Hot Frosty” goes up against Johnson’s “Red One,” Stiller’s “Nutcrackers” and Black’s “Dear Santa.” Only one survives!
Round 1: “Dear Santa” vs. “Hot Frosty”
Let’s be clear: “Hot Frosty” is a monumentally stupid movie about a chiseled hottie snowman (Dustin Milligan) who comes to life in a snowy small town to woo a widowed café owner (Chabert). The movie follows the Hallmark roadmap beat by beat, which works well enough except for the part where the snowman acts like an infant for the entire movie. He was just born! He needs to learn about the world from television! Fine, but maybe Chabert shouldn’t be so attracted to someone with the cognitive capacity of a 3-year-old.
“Dear Santa,” available on Paramount Plus, somehow manages to follow an even more unfortunate path. A lonely kid accidentally writes a letter to Satan instead of Santa, resulting in a demon (played by Black) showing up in his bedroom to grant wishes in exchange for his young soul.
It’s not a terrible idea for a premise (basically a rehash of “Bedazzled,” but whatever), and Black has a few amusing line deliveries. However, the movie’s secret subplot doesn’t match the “There’s Something About Mary” buffoonery one would expect from a Farrelly Brothers enterprise. You see, the kid is lonely because his little brother died, his parents blame each other for the death and his best friend keeps lying about having cancer for laughs. Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!
Winner: “Hot Frosty.”
Round 2: “Red One” vs “Hot Frosty”
You’d be forgiven for forgetting about Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans’ lumbering $250 million would-be franchise starter, as it opened just before “Wicked,” “Gladiator II” and “Moana 2” sparked the box office over Thanksgiving. A PG-13 sorta-action movie about the kidnapping of Santa Claus contains excessive and lifeless CGI and dull “shared universe” building (to the point that it’s surprising Nick Fury doesn’t show up at the end of it). Johnson plays the same boring “hero” he’s played for the past 10 years, and Evans only seems there for a paycheck.
Comparatively, “Hot Frosty” contains only occasionally distracting shots of CGI snow falling from the sky. Rather than using CGI to make the snowman’s eight-pack abs, the actor created them the old-fashioned way: Weeks and weeks of intensive workouts and starvation.
Winner: “Hot Frosty”
Round 3: “Nutcrackers” vs. “Hot Frosty”
After a streak of increasingly poor horror films, director David Gordon Green tries to return to his indie roots with “Nutcrackers,” about a workaholic (Ben Stiller) forced to care for his four newly orphaned nephews on a rural Ohio farm. Hoping to find a foster family willing to take the rambunctious kids, the uncle concocts a series of holiday-themed schemes (just call me the Hiphopopotamus, my lyrics are bottomless) to rally the townsfolk.
Although you can predict every turn in the story, Stiller knows how to garner laughs as a flustered foil to kid shenanigans. Despite the overfamiliar screenplay, “Nutcrackers” even earns its heart-tugging climax.
However, if I’m being honest, I probably laughed more at comedians Craig Robinson and Joe Lo Truglio playing overzealous cops in “Hot Frosty” than I did at Stiller in “Nutcrackers.” And despite its winter setting, there isn’t a single flake of snow in the supposedly holiday-themed “Nutcrackers!”
Give me that Chabert-Moron Snowman romance!
Winner and champion: “Hot Frosty.”
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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.
