MST3K Top 25: #24, "Jack Frost"

Continuing in my reviews of some person's top 25 list of MST3k movies, it's Jack Frost!

No, not you.

Former a sort of troika with two other movies, Jack Frost is one of several Russo-Finnish productions that the boys and the bots endured, and it's probably my favourite of the lot.

Produced by a film company with far more love of their native lands' mythology than they have moviemaking talent, this is, in its essence, a retelling of a whole bunch of Slavic stories, with its main set piece a story in which a young and powerful hero learns an important lesson about humility in pursuit of his lady love, a young woman who lives a Cinderella-like life of misery in a house with a horribly mother, a browbeaten father and an ugly stepsister who is the apple of her mother's eye. I mean, a beet of her mother's eye. Beets are Russian, aren't they?

Anyhow, if you've ever read Joseph's Campbells, "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" or watched a George Lucas movie, you know about how this movie goes. It begins, as they always do, with a young, beautiful woman named Nastenka being threatened with a horrible beating if she doesn't knit a pair of socks in a single night, which means that she has to plead with the dawning sun to stay down for just a few stitches longer, while out in the woods her future husband Ivan beats up a bunch of bad guys, throwing their clubs into orbit, before ignoring the admonition of a mushroom-headed wizard and pridefully attempting to shoot a mother bear with her cubs in order to impress Nastenka, causing him to gain the head of a bear. Y'know, the usual.

Not you either.

So, cursed with the head of a bear, Ivan goes off to do good deeds in an attempt get back in the mushroom wizard's good graces, and hopefully in Nastenka's good graces as well. After driving off several groups of people with his horrifying bear-headedness, he encounters an old woman who needs helps getting to her home in the mountains. She rides him bear-back* all the way home, finding out when she gets there that she's blind. The mushroom wizard restores Ivan's fine-looking head and he tears off looking for Nastenka.

Meanwhile, Nastenka's put back to the grinding wheel, working hard for her mother in an effort to get the ugly stepsister married off. It works out in one of the ways you expect it will - the mother does everything she can to hide Nastenka's beauty, Nastenka remains pure and faithful to herself and when she tries to sacrifice herself to help someone else (the stepsister, in this case), she's revealed to be as beautiful on the outside as she is on the inside. Naturally, her mother commands her father to take her out to the woods to abandon her. Horrified at the thought, he decides to go against her, but rather than let him face her wrath, she sacrifices herself again and jumps off.

That's the stuff.

Then she meets Jack Frost! Finally! Near the end of the movie! He's actually a pretty nice guy in this iteration, basically just a dude responsible for bringing on winter with a magic staff that you must never touch or you fall into eternal slumber. He takes her off to his place to warm up, then takes off, leaving behind his staff because of course he does.

Meanwhile, Ivan can't find his beloved and so consults one of my favourite characters in all of folklore: Baba Yaga. She flies across the sky in a mortar piloted by a pestle and lives in a cabin that runs around the land on chicken feet. She's basically immortal, is always cranky and is typically either the villain of the tale, or the person who tells the hero what they need to know, but only after they beat her challenges.

In this case, the challenge is evidently stuffing her into her own oven. A couple of times. Tough old bird, that Baba Yaga. He snags a magic sled and heads over to Jack Frost's where, if you've been following the plot at all, you know that Nastenka has touched Jack Frost's staff* and now sleeps in a deep, magical slumber. Does she awaken from it when Ivan confesses his love for her? Yes, yes she does.

They return to town, with Jack Frost who, seeing how terrible the ugly stepsister and her mom are, drives the ugly sister away on a pig-driven sled with a dowry of ravens. And, of course, gender balance is restored and the henpecked husband is restored to being the head of his house as Ivan marries Nastenka in what amounts to a cutscene.

Fin.

Whatta Fin. The movie is ridiculous, but the skits are even better. Mike dresses up like Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance, Bobo and Brain Guy have a petty squabble after spending too much together, Crow gets turned into a bear and eats Tom Servo - it's just a great episode of MST3K all around.

Rating: B+. It's not traditional Western filmmaking, and it's goofy as all heck, but it's also fun and fast-paced and is really supposed to make you laugh. I think that's what a lot of people miss about mythology in general - it's supposed to be funny. Odysseus telling the Cyclopes that his name is "Nothing" is supposed to make you laugh; Robin of Locksley being genuinely terrible in a fistfight is intended to make him a little mockable. The humour here is ... Finno-Russian, but it's supposed to be there, and I would watch this movie without Mike and the bots. Well, I would, except I've watched it about half a dozen times with them, so...

* Yes, I see what I did there.