Cool As Ice (91 minutes)

"I'm gonna go across the street and, uh, schling a schlong."

Sometimes I write about movies everyone knows and loves (Dazed and Confused recently surpassed The Golden Child as my most popular post) and sometimes I write about the strangest cultural moments I can find (like Jack Frost). Today is one of those weird days, but stick with it, there’s more than meets the eye. And hey, if you like a steady flow of movie content, why not subscribe? It’s free! 

I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my friend Nick. Nick and I met in college and he is a connoisseur of bad movies. Truly, he’s seen just about every B-movie, cult film, video-rental-dumpster-find you can think of. He’s a master of his craft. When I put out a plea for movies to write about, he took it a step further and sent me some DVDs in the mail. Nothing feels more legitimate to me as a writer than getting actual movies in the mail. And in the envelope was 1991’s Cool As Ice (91 minutes) starring none other than Vanilla Ice. 

In so many ways Cool As Ice is what I was expecting. It is edited like a long music video, Vanilla Ice has an innate inability to act, he has questionable (and downright disturbing) dating practices… But what I wasn’t expecting was visual work so bizarrely interesting it belongs on lists of surrealist and expressionist movies for film study. I mean this. And because it would be so, so easy to spend the majority of this newsletter tearing down Vanilla Ice, I am going to start with this unique visual style. (We’ll get into the bad and weird in due time.)

The opening credits were shocking and baffling: Janusz Kaminski - Director of Photography. 

…yes, he is the man now known as Steven Spielberg’s Cinematographer. If only you could see the question marks that appeared across my and my husband’s faces as we took this information in.

Kaminski does not disappoint. What occurred was a visually rich and creative approach to this movie that left me asking (consistently and constantly) “Was Vanilla Ice aware he was in a surrealist picture?” The entire movie is full of interesting angles, camera motion, and lighting choices, but a lot of my favorite moments occur at the house of the two mechanics, Roscoe (Sydney Lassick) and Mae (Dody Goodman). 

Their home is a funhouse with a lawn lined with numerous lit up world globes and their garage is made up of wood planks cut into zig-zags, painted colorfully, and erected at odd, cartoonish angles. My favorite is when the band is trying to eat lunch and we see Princess (Allison Dean) sitting in front of a bowl of bright blue eggs. In the foreground are salt and pepper shakers. Or at least we think they’re in the foreground because when she goes to lift them up it turns out they’re really as big as they appear in the shot:

This is just a taste of the bizarre set and film choices made during a movie that otherwise takes itself pretty seriously. Or at least, the actors are taking it seriously. I can’t say the same for the crew…

(By the way, I knew going into this that someone else out there had to have also watched this and thought, “I gotta write about this” and they did. David Friedman of Ironic Sans has a short tidy post full of screenshots on this topic. So you can click on over there and see what I mean.)

Another favorite aspect of mine is how our lead romantic interest, Kathy (Kristin Minter) has a bowl full of bright blue fish and nothing else in her room. The bowl appears time and time again. I couldn’t put my finger on what anyone was trying to say with the blue fish but Kaminski had a hell of a fun time lighting it and highlighting it. God - now that I think of it - even her bedroom set-up is just bizarre! Her bed is kitty-corner to the wall and window behind it instead of being flush against the wall. My husband said this is because they built the set poorly but I don’t know… It seems purposeful in this Pee-Wee-esque nightmare (shout out to Rolling Stone for the perfect comparison).

Bowl of Fish and Kitty-Corner Bed

I suppose what I was experiencing was a studio cash grab with an untalented lead paired with a filmmaker with vision. I just wasn’t expecting to. Tim Brayton over at Alternate Ending says it best, writing, “View it [Cool as Ice] as a feature-length portfolio, showcasing every kind of challenge that Kaminski could set for himself to prove that he could come up with beautiful solutions to any problem that might plausibly crop up in a mainstream film.” It truly does read as someone using a shitty opportunity to practice and refine their artistry. Good for him. It paid off because he was winning an Academy Award for Cinematography three short years later. 

From Cool As Ice to Schindler’s List: The Janusz Kaminski Story

Truthfully, outside of the surrealist daydream visuals we were gifted, there isn’t a lot to this movie. Vanilla Ice is somehow charmless and charming as Johnny, a rapper who tours with his bandmates from city-to-city. He does not have a way with women. He meets Kathy (a high school senior, mind you) as she is riding her horse. He decides the best course of action is to jump a fence in his motorcycle, thus causing the horse to throw Kathy and take off. People have died this way, Johnny. But he brushes it off as Kathy being overdramatic.

Later, he makes it up to her by breaking into her bedroom while she is sleeping (!!) and putting his fingers and a melting ice cube in her mouth (!!!). He has massive predator vibes and doesn’t care to hide them. No really, he can’t. At one point he even says, “I'm gonna go across the street and, uh, schling a schlong.” (This is a real movie.)

I nearly passed away viewing this.

However, I can admit there is a charm to Vanilla Ice as a leading man in that… he seems a little like an unaware understudy’s understudy called up at the last moment. He’s just really, really happy to be here, even if the movie is ridiculous. Even if he doesn’t know what he is doing. Even if he is ad libbing more than he should. He has the sort of blind optimism and sheer confidence that only a white man topping rap charts in 1991 could have. It’s the kind of dumb energy I wish I could have on a regular basis. But I don't, so I'm doomed to care and write about movies like these for the rest of my life. 

The plot is useless, pointless, confusing in time and space. (Classic surrealism once again…) While Johnny is falling in love with Kathy, the mechanics are trying to fix his bandmate’s bike, and Kathy’s dad is coping with… well… Kathy’s dad it turns out is in the witness protection program and he’s seen on TV because of Kathy’s good grades so now some old “friends” are after him for money. He can’t come up with the money (Or refuses it? Unclear.) And so the two goons kidnap his son and Kathy’s brother. Everyone in this bummer of a town blames Johnny naturally because of his haircut, Gaultier sunglasses, and Stussy t-shirt. 

Yes - the fashion was not lost on me. For reference, here is his haircut: 

And that’s all I’ll say on the matter. 

In the end, Johnny saves the day and gets the girl. Does he deserve either? No. But then again, he didn’t deserve to have Naomi Campbell play his back-up singer in the opening credits either.

Cool As Ice is hands down the strangest movie I’ve seen this year. Would I recommend it to the general public? Absolutely not. Would I recommend it to my best friend? Probably not. But would I recommend it to all you film weirdos out there? Totally. But insert this into your DVD player at your own risk.