Yikes, Yikes Baby

Review number two…

Question for parents, well, anyone, really: If a guy like Vanilla Ice showed up on your doorstep, what would you do? 1991’s Cool As Ice attempts to answer that question, but mostly it’s a vanity project for decidedly one of the most polarizing rap artists of the late twentieth century.

I don’t want to think about this movie ever again beyond this review. Yeah. It’s that bad.

The movie opens with Vanilla Ice doing his best Minnie Pearl impression as he raps his way through his Naomi Campbell collab song, “Cool As Ice.” Yeah, the whole song. The opening credits go on for almost a solid five minutes, and it’s everything we would normally see in an early-90s music video. Gyrating women in Spandex. Guys in crazy button-downs and zoot suits. Wiggly spotlights. Lots of dust in the air. Doc Martens walking in slow motion through what we hope is water.

Then we see Ice, whose name is supposed to be Johnny (!!!), getting a girl’s phone number while his three friends, Jazz (Deezer D), Princess (Allison Dean), and Sir D (Kevin Hicks) stand by literally going, “Awwwww.”

That’s about all these people do. It’s as if a bunch of Yes People, a Greek Chorus, and the most extraneous of tagalongs got caught in a blender. A neon pink blender with random designs and giant chartreuse buttons.

After that, Johnny and his posse sing “Ho,” for the open highway as they careen down the road on some of the most garishly painted motorcycles known to man. As they get close to a small town, Johnny spies a teenager riding her horse in a field, and for some reason he decides to jump his bike over the fence. Naturally, this girl, whose name is Kathy (Kristin Minter), falls off her horse, and naturally, Johnny somehow makes off with her day planner. Because of course she’s got it on her while horseback riding.

Ice and his posse would probably ride right through town, wherever it is, but Jazz’s bike breaks down and the group tows him to a mechanic shop that’s straight out of Peewee’s Playhouse. At least, the owners, Mae (Dody Goodman) and Roscoe (Sydney Lassick) seem to be mechanics. Their shop is way too clean and colorful for that.

While Ice tries to be a hip hop Gene Kelly, Mae and Roscoe get to working on the bike, and by that I mean Roscoe takes it apart while Mae pores over what looks like an ancient edition of Motorcycles For Dummies. Princess eats some unidentified teal blobs salted with sodium chloride from a giant salt shaker. Jazz makes a sandwich consisting of crunchy peanut butter, pickles, sardines, mustard, and a pineapple ring on white bread. Ugh. Move over, UHF Twinkie hot dog.

As for Kathy, she conveniently lives right up the street. Johnny races there on his bike and tries to ingratiate himself to her with no results, except that she wants her day planner back. What follows is Johnny following her to the Sugar Shack, where he gets up onstage and raps while all the nerds back away slowly. Kathy’s boyfriend, Nick (John Newton) is disgusted at Johnny’s sudden appearances, especially when Johnny ropes Kathy into dancing with him while he raps.

To be fair, it’s pretty creepy. Johnny does backbends so deep that he’s almost on top of Kathy. Nick responds by smashing up Princess and Sir D’s bikes. Long story short, Kathy breaks up with Nick, Johnny breaks Nick’s nose, and Johnny and Kathy make plans to meet up the next day. Kathy still wants her day planner back.

Gee whiz, Johnny’s a creep. When Kathy wakes up the next day, Johnny’s laying next to her in bed. Instead of throwing him out, Kathy’s strangely intrigued, and meets him outside in a jean jacket, a sundress, and cute little bike shorts, after which they speed off to a construction site, where they cavort around as if they’re in a music video.

That’s what the whole movie is like. All of it looks as if it’s in a music video. Quick cuts. Sped-up frame rates. Shafts of light filtered through dust particles and fog. Johnny can’t talk like a normal person to save his life. Even when the plot-like thingie in this movie tries to be serious and have Kathy’s parents, Gordon (Michael Gross) and Grace (Candy Clark) as refugees in Witness Protection, everything looks like a music video.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, director David Kellogg’s only credits prior to Cool As Ice were music videos, and director of photography Janusz Kaminski, who would be the DP of Schindler’s List in a few years, seemed to go along with it. Quick cuts are a staple of music videos, or at least they were in the early nineties.

The other reason, and I’m just spitballing here, but I don’t think Kellogg or Kaminski had enough confidence in Vanilla Ice’s strengths as a performer to sustain a long take. Whereas geniuses like Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, or Judy Garland could handle fewer cuts, Vanilla Ice just wasn’t on that level.

And yeah, about the music. Oh my word, the music in Cool As Ice. I even hesitate to call it music. I confess, I put the Beastie Boys and EMF on as brain cleansers whenever Vanilla Ice started rapping and then went back to the movie. It only prolonged the agony, but getting a break from the pretension was completely worth it.

I remember when this movie came out, my first response was “Why?” My second response was, “No.” My third response was “Why, really?” And then I went about my business because I thought Vanilla Ice was a hack who couldn’t hold a candle to DC Talk and MC Hammer. Which he really couldn’t. Anyone who remembers that time will no doubt recall when MC Hammer famously and amiably said that if he had one leg, he could still outdance Vanilla Ice.

And Ice’s star faded pretty quickly, right around the time of the release of Cool As Ice, which made a paltry $1.92M from three-hundred ninety-three theaters over seventy-seven days. and boasts a three-percent critics’ rating on Rotton Tomatoes. The public seemed pretty set in their aversion, too. Legend has it, during a free concert in Birmingham, Alabama in 1998, Vanilla Ice threw copies of his new album into an audience, only to have the audience throw them back.

Now, granted, Vanilla Ice has reinvented himself since his forays into music and acting, and to be honest, he’s probably made more working in home improvement and construction than as a rapper. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, but as a whole, pop culture seems to have breathed a sigh of relief.

For more so-bad-it’s-goodness, please see Days One, Two, and Three. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you tomorrow for the Wrapup…

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Cool As Ice is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Amazon. The RiffTrax version is free to stream on Prime and Tubi.

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