Cool As Ice

Cool As Ice (1991)

HBO Broadcast, Seattle, WA

December 09, 2007

* / ****

by Scott Muoio

Cool As Ice, the 1991 cinematic vehicle for rapper Vanilla Ice, is a textbook example of how not to make a movie. It is a bad movie, a really bad movie, but loves its badness with such earnestness that by the time Ice crashes through a sheet rock wall on his motorcycle and engages in hand-to-hand combat with a pair of thugs you’ll be laughing so hard it won’t even matter.

The secret to Cool As Ice’s unsuccess begins with a typical story, moves on to lousy shooting fundamentals, builds with crummy music, climaxes with poor taste at every angle, and concludes with a mind numbingly boring display of ridiculous artistic statements. A dull story is one thing, but when a movie adds television movie-of-the-week style ludicrousness it becomes a cult classic. However, as cult movie aficionados understand, there are those cult movies we love for their badness and those we merely like to talk about but can’t stand to stomach through even a partial viewing. Cool As Ice definitely fits the latter description. It is a bad, bad movie in all regards.

A short examination of the movie’s plot gives us half of what we need to know in order to completely treasure (or is it bury?) this cinematic travesty. Vanilla Ice stars as Johnny, imagined as sort of a James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause minus the cool and killer acting ability. Cruising through Glendora, California with his sport bike motorcycle crew, the gang winds up staying in town a couple weeks while one of their members gets his broken down bike repaired. Cue the perfect rich girl (Kristin Minter), who Johnny meets, frolics with on a construction site, and rides around town with on the back of his motorcycle. Of course, said girl’s daddy (Michael Gross) doesn’t approve, her boyfriend (John Newton) gets jealous and subsequently dumped, and then finally a big misunderstanding and kidnapping plot turns the whole thing into total bizarro world. And did I mention Ice's “Sex Me” jacket? Oh, never mind.

The second half of the poor movie madness that is Cool As Ice revolves around director David Kellogg’s “artistic statements.” That his previous credits include nothing other than a smorgasbord of Playboy centerfold directing gigs surely comes as no surprise and tells you all you need to know about just how tacky and ludicrous this movie gets. But just for fun, let us catalogue the best of the worst: crooked camera angles, dozens of shots taken from the ground up at sixty degree angles, a plethora of slow motion montages, a handful of gratuitous dance segues, and more monotonous motorcycle cruising footage than a Ducati commercial. However, there is some good to the bad (no thanks to Kellogg), and in honor of reporting fairly and with the utmost honesty, two positive truths must be mentioned. The first is Ice can dance, and you might forget that before he turned his back on his former persona the guy was quite a bit more talented than he was generally given credit. The second positive of the movie is the day-glo candy colored clothing and scenery. The sights while terribly redundant and grating by the end, are a joy to behold for a little while and Glendora itself a colorful place that reminds us of many ‘80s classic California movies people like me have grown up loving.

Outside of that pair of kudos, however, the real truth is blatantly obvious: Cool As Ice stinks and if you never see it for yourself you’ll surely be better off.