COOL AS ICE
Rated PG / 90 Minutes / Dir: David Kellogg
Available on DVD from Universal as part of their MOD “Vault Series”.
Also available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

Author’s note: The following review is a revised version, previously posted in 2016 on my former blog, “The Sconnie Cinephile.”

Cool As Ice is one of my favorite obscure “cult” films of all time.  In order to fully appreciate this gem for all its ‘so bad it’s good’-ness, I think a little historical context is in order.

For a brief period in late 1990, Vanilla Ice was one of the biggest pop stars in the world.  On the strength of two hit singles, Ice Ice Baby and Play That Funky Music, Ice’s album To The Extreme sold 15 million copies worldwide and he became a reluctant teen idol almost overnight.

To me, Cool As Ice seems to be the spiritual opposite of The Beatles’ 1964 classic (and Criterion Collection member), A Hard Day’s Night.  Both films were conceived as low budget exploitation features designed to cash in on a new trend.  But while “A Hard Day’s Night” was a massive financial and critical success which helped to boost The Beatles’ already growing popularity in the States and abroad, Cool As Ice was a massive flop which was released about 10 months too late.

By the time Cool As Ice hit theaters on October 18, 1991, the wheels had all but fallen off of the Vanilla Ice gravy train.   In February of that year, Vanilla Ice’s ‘autobiography’ Ice By Ice was published.  Advertised as Ice’s life story ‘in his own words’, the story was almost completely fabricated by the publicists at SBK Records in a vain attempt to gain street cred with the hip hop establishment, many of whom saw Vanilla Ice as a novelty act.   As a result, Cool As Ice grossed about $1 million at the box office on a $6 million budget and was pulled from theaters just three weeks into its release.

Vanilla Ice stars as Johnny, a macho rapper / motorcycle enthusiast whose entourage must make a pit stop in a small, unnamed Midwestern town when one of their bikes breaks down.  Kristin Minter (Home Alone) plays Kathy, an all-American “good girl” who is about to leave for college. I’ll bet you can already see where this is going.

Cool As Ice is one of the most unintentionally funny movies I have ever seen.  I’ve watched this film a number of times over the years, but one thing that really caught my attention while reviewing it for this blog is just how inconsistent the film’s tone is.  The mood of the piece often shifts abruptly between humorous and almost menacing, especially in the film’s second half, and the effect is a bit jarring.

Fun fact: This film’s director of photography was cinematographer Janusz Kaminski.  Three years later, he won an Oscar for his work on Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Schindler’s List.  The two have continued working together on all of Spielberg’s films since.

A great deal of this movie’s awkward charm is due to Vanilla Ice’s portrayal of Johnny, who is an almost cartoonish exaggeration of Ice’s own public persona at the time. 

In addition to his primary interests of rapping and racing his neon yellow crotch rocket through suburban areas, Johnny enjoys spouting off corny one liners like “Drop that zero and get with the hero!”.  Johnny is also an boorish jackass who takes pride in making a spectacle of himself wherever he goes.

I think another part of the film’s cult status is due to its rarity on the home video market for decades after its release. I don’t know if Cool As Ice was ever sold directly to consumers on VHS. Every copy I’ve seen on the used market over the years was a former rental tape. DVDs were a ‘thing’ for almost 20 years before Universal bothered to get this movie out on the format, and the version that did come out in 2016 was “manufactured on demand” through Amazon. It finally received a Blu-ray release in 2021 and it looks and sounds far better than some people probably think it deserves. Cool As Ice is truly one of the most beautifully shot ‘bad’ movies of all time.

Cool As Ice is structured around several musical montages, but oddly none of the songs on To The Extreme are heard in the film.  The opening credits play over a music video of sorts which features a “special appearance” by supermodel Naomi Campbell, who also sings the hook on the title track.  You may also notice a brief cameo by model Bobbie Brown (credited as Bobby Brown), who is best known to us 80s-90s kids for her appearances in Great White’s Once Bitten Twice Shy and Warrant’s Cherry Pie videos.

I recommend this film to all fans of 1990s nostalgia, and to all others who enjoy an awkward laugh or two.  Hollywood makes a lot of mediocre films, but movies that cross the line into watchable ‘bad movie’ status are quite rare indeed.