It might seem hard to believe but every few years, the world is graced with a sudden resurgence of relevance for Robert Van Winkle. Better known as Vanilla Ice, Mr. Van Winkle has seemingly dodged being chronically unemployed for the better part of two decades simply by being in the right place at the right/wrong time. It is quite an accomplishment for someone that most of the human population thinks is largely untalented.
Van Winkle wasn't always a punchline. In the mid-1980s he was actually a fairly celebrated motocross rider. In his racing career he won three Grand National championships before an ankle injury kept him out of active competition. From there, he turned his attention to beat-boxing and breakdancing. Eventually he became the rapper we all know and "love" today. You know, the one who stole a hook from a Queen song, dated Madonna, appeared in her Sex book, sang about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and got dangled off a balcony by Suge Knight? That guy.
Ice's popularity as a rapper (and he was extremely popular, becoming the first ever hip-hop artist to hit number one on the Billboard charts) flamed out about as quickly as, well, an ice cube in a fire. His unfortunately delayed second album tanked and despite reinventing himself twice as a Rastafarian and as a nu-metal screamer, Ice never regained his musical fame. He did, however, become a television mainstay.
Ice would appear on several reality TV shows and find any way possible to keep making headlines. In 1999, he infamously trashed an MTV set when the video from his biggest hit "Ice Ice Baby" was officially "retired." In 2007, he trashed the set of a spin off of the show The Surreal Life when he was voted off. He has his own show where he tells people how to buy real estate that is about to go into its second season (?!?) and he recently signed a deal with Insane Clown Posse's Psychopathic Records to release what is technically his fifth proper album. On top of all this, Mr. Ice has graced Canada with his presence by being a judge on the new reality based talent show Canada Sings.
Say what you will about the irony of the talentless judging a talent show, but (1) that's the way of the world and (2) the man has seemingly never met a craze he couldn't exploit for some sort of fun and profit. When flash and positivity were in style, he was there. When taking drugs and moping was cool, he was there. When it was time to be self reflexive and introspective about the evils of celebrity, he was there. Ice isn't stupid, in fact, he is far from it. There is almost something admirable in the way he is constantly able to grind out a paycheck.
The only problem with the Iceman's work ethic is that other than his debut album, nothing he has done has ever turned out to be a huge, game changing success. More often than not, it is something that blows up in his face. Take for instance today's subject, the 1991 film Cool as Ice, a cheaply made quickie production from Universal Pictures (brief owner of Ice's former label SBK) designed to cash in on the cool that was Ice. Coming out as the shine was wearing off from his first album and sadly well before his second (a live concert album not withstanding), Cool as Ice debuted to thundering silence in theatres across the United States (and none in Canada where it was never theatrically distributed as far as I could see). Debuting at number 14 on October 18th, Cool as Ice failed to make 1/8th of what the fourth place Ernest Scared Stupid made. That's how dire the situation was.
Ice would win another award that year to place next to his American Music Awards and People's Choice Awards. He took the Golden Raspberry at the Razzies for Worst New Star. The film itself would be nominated for 8 other dishonours that year, but only Ice would win. The film itself has now become synonymous with overexposure and exploitation of a celebrity image (on top of being fucking terrible), but I defy most people to turn down the kind of money Van Winkle was getting thrown his way to look like a fool on camera.
Cool as Ice opens with a five minute music video featuring Ice rapping in a warehouse of some sort while supermodel Naomi Campbell sings the hook. It is all just really standard montage type stuff set to a terrible song until you get one important credit that comes up on screen: Director of Photography: Janusz Kaminski. Cool as Ice was shot by a man who was just two years away from his first Academy Award for cinematography and his first collaboration with Stephen Spielberg with Schindler's List. If one nice thing can be said about Cool as Ice, its that it really is well shot.
Well shot and well edited are two entirely different things, as this movie takes a full seven and a half minutes for anything to happen. As soon as the musical number is over, Ice and his three black friends (because we really need to up his street cred to an urban audience that already knows he is a joke) leave the warehouse club and take off on their motorcycles to go... somewhere. The friends all seem in a hurry to leave, but the movie never explains why. There isn't another show they have to go to immediately. And why do they all have motorcycles? Was that a request from Ice or was it to make him look like an even more ridiculous version of James Dean.
Before we even know the name of Ice's character, one of his friends points out a pretty young woman riding a horse alongside them on the country road they find themselves on. So Ice goes about getting the girl's attention the best way he knows how: by jumping a fence on his bike and nearly killing her. He follows that up by giving her shit for being pissed off over that whole nearly killing her thing.
After that little run in, Ice inexplicably knows that this girl is in love with him, but without a plot contrivance there will be no way for the two of them to ever see each other again. Thankfully, the motorcycle of the fat friend breaks down and they need to tow the broken down bike into town. As they roll through the nearest suburban enclave the audience is treated to reaction shots from boy scouts, what looks to be the dancing Six Flags guy, and a guy on a lawnmower all stopped in their tracks and gaping slack jawed as if they have never seen three black people and a clown before.
They very randomly happen upon a "whack ass" house that looks like Pee Wee's garage sale. It also very randomly happens that the crazed proprietor and his wife know how to fix motorcycles. Or not. That's never made clear. It really just seems like a case of the blind leading the blind because they end up stripping the bike down entirely causing Ice and his posse to be inconvenienced for A FULL DAY! The passage of time is shown by several time eating montages of Ice and his homies dancing, making sandwiches, sleeping, wearing wacky headgear, watching television, dancing, using belt grinders, building houses made of cards, and dancing. Really riveting stuff.
I should probably pause for a moment and mention that the director of Cool as Ice is a man by the name of David Kellogg. A luminary in the world of making commercials and with an IMDB resume that includes no less than 12 Playboy video collections, Kellogg only made one other theatrical feature. That film was the similarly afflicted and somehow even worse live-action Inspector Gadget in 1999. Both films suffer from having no sense of pacing, no idea how to transition between scenes, horrible fight sequences, and almost universally terrible acting. Inspector Gadget might be the one of the worst things produced in the history of forever, but this is Cool as Ice. Astoundingly, Kellogg has actually disowned Cool as Ice because it wasn't true to his vision. I guess there weren't enough insert shots and random graphics for his liking.
Now in town with some time to kill, Ice (whose character is really named Johnny, but fuck that noise since he's just Vanilla Ice no matter what you call him) takes note that the girl he nearly paralyzed earlier with his wacky shenanigans is living across the street from Roald Dahl's house. So he goes to visit "dat chick who drive da horse" and finds out her name is Kathy, who is alternately called Katherine by her overly square parents and Kat by V. Ice, only to find out she is dating an uptight tool named Nick. Because, you see, Nick rhymes with Dick, and without a name for Ice to freestyle some rhymes off of there wouldn't be any wit in this film.
After uttering the iconic line "Drop that zero, get with the hero" and stealing Kathy's day planner (and after two more montages), the film cuts to her family gathering around the television to watch their daughter make the evening news just for being excellent. Kathy has a 4.0 and double 800s on her SATs. The sky seems to be the limit for this chronic overachiever and as Ice watches the same newscast, he falls deeper into what I think is love but comes across more as constipated.
Unfortunately, this slow news day is bad news for her father, who has apparently been in the witness protection program since before Kathy was born for double crossing a pair of crooked police officers. What exactly happened, I have no idea. I never wrote it down. It was just white noise. Needless to say, if her father doesn't pay them an arbitrary sum of money ($500,000. I did write that down) within the next 24 hours, they will do something nasty to his family. It is really lucky for the film that these two disgraced cops just happened to be in the same place at the same time or else there wouldn't be any dramatic tension.
Once the news is over, which Ice probably just watched for the comics section to come on, he tells his homies he is going to go "shling a shlong," which apparently means go across the street like he's The Fonz to try and see Kathy. Unfortunately Kathy has already left and Ice ends up talking to her mother and little brother. The little brother, named Tommy and is the only remotely likeable character in the film, immediately takes a shine to Ice because his hair is like a lighthouse and he is wearing the most ridiculous clothing known to man. Furthermore, I also like that several times when Tommy is on screen he is playing Nintendo and the sound effects from Super Mario Brothers 3 are so loud that they drown out the dialog.
It turns out Kathy has just left to meet Nick at the only club in town: The Sugar Shack. Of course the place is square as hell, with the club filled with nerds in thick rimmed glasses where Nick will look like a God of badassery since he is the only person drinking. (And he is drinking from his own bottle of cheap vodka!) The band is atrociously white and playing a cover of Sly and the Family Stone's "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)" that might be played for laughs, but is still unlistenable. Which means it's time for Ice to turn the party out and drop some "funkay lhyriks."
This display of bravado and ego stroking gains the attention of Kathy who tells Ice to return her day planner by tomorrow or she calls the cops. She in turn steals his driver's license without him knowing it as an insurance policy. She didn't get double 800s for nothing.
Of course Nick gets jealous and his crew of friends that we never knew he had show up to trash what they think is Ice's bike, but turns out to be the bike of one of his friends. At the sight of this injustice to the property of one Mr. Sir D, Ice has to truly prove that he is "Down By Law" like his jacket says. He regulates like he's Warren G in a fight scene where absolutely no punches hit their mark and people just fall down rather than getting knocked out. Apparently the fight was bad enough to send Nick to the hospital, but I like to think Nick got whiplash from trying to sell all of the terrible stunts.
The next morning, Kathy wakes up and BAM! ice is in her mouth. Not literally. Well, actually, yes, literally. Ice is in her room shoving and ice cube into her mouth and telling her to be quiet and not wake her father up. All I can think is how long was he there just staring at her in bed and where he got the ice cube from. He seems pretty stupid so I envision he had been there for several hours and he kept creeping downstairs to get more ice cubes from the freezer.
After a chaste scene of sexual teasing that stopped just shy of putting a hot dog through a doughnut, Kathy and Ice have their first date at the site of a house that is under construction in the middle of what appears to be a salt flat. In between such rousing dialog as "So, what's it like having parents and stuff?" and "I'd like to do something wild because I never have." the audience is treated to what would appear to be some sort of fashion ad.
Ice and Kathy jump around and play on the skeletal house, but they are looking directly into the camera most of the time and making goofy faces. They don't appear to be playfully chasing each other since there really isn't anything to suggest that the camera is shooting from the point of view of the opposite person. It seems like something that inexplicably took two days to shoot and neither of them were there at the same time.
After the movie detours for another clothing ad and Ice's love ballad, the movie finally gets to the plot contrivance that is going to race the film to its conclusion. Kathy's dad mistakenly believes that Ice is in cahoots with the two crooked cops and uses the fact that he put Nick in the hospital to damn Ice eternally and forbids Kathy from ever seeing him again. Ice very astutely states that he has no idea what her father is talking about and that "whackhead was trying to play baseball with my homeboy's bike." Perfectly understandable since he is so clearly Down By Law. I know I would trust the guy with "Sex Me Up" on the sleeve of his leathers with my daughter.
The father levels with his daughter and we are treated to a couple more montages to pad out a respectable theatrical length. The idiotic and incompetent energy that the film had going in its favour suddenly flags and the film just gets boring to watch. There is one "good" scene where Ice takes a heartbroken Tommy for a ride on his motorcycle and we get to see a young boy flip the bird to Nick just as he is driving home from the hospital. It truly proves that a young child giving someone the middle finger is never, ever not funny.
Tommy is kidnapped mid-Tecmo Bowl and the kidnappers send an audio tape to his family to show they mean businesses. Kathy, instead of turning to the actual police or the FBI who put her father in witness protection in the first place, turns to Ice for help. Ice CSI's the shit out of that audio tape and deduces through the films incredibly overblown Foley Editing that her brother is being kept at the same construction site they playfully romped through the previous afternoon. The day is saved! The bike is fixed! Nothing happened!
And then the movie ends with another seven minute music video back at the club from the beginning. I honestly just shut the movie off at that point. Did I really need to sit through any more of it? No.
There really might not be any one person to fully blame for this film being this bad since it was a premise doomed from the start. Sure, Kellogg sucks as a director and Ice's face is constantly frozen in one expression except for being able to raise his eyebrow every once in a while, but this really is just another fad movie condemned to obscurity. It was a product of its time that will likely never see release on DVD or Blu-ray. And that, as we all like to say, is for the best.
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