It's not where you're from, it's where you're at.

Cool As Ice
David Kellogg 1991 USA
Starring: Vanilla Ice, Kristin Minter, Candy Clark, Deezer D, Michael Gross, John Haymes Newton, Victor DiMattia

Sometimes a film is made that is so ridiculous and bizarre that it holds a power of fascination and will often end up becoming a cult favourite and sometimes a film will be made with a premise so wildly implausible and insane that you have to wonder how anyone thought it could ever be a marketable and entertaining idea. Cool As Ice straddles these two points uneasily, its basis being a loose remake of 1950's biker picture The Wild One with white rapper Vanilla Ice in the Marlon Brando role. There are several problems with this idea, most of them too obvious to even bother writing about, but the main one is plainly that Ice is no Marlon Brando, he's not even a Nicolas Cage. Honestly comparing any normal actor to Brando isn't going to be particularly helpful to either party and Ice isn't a normal actor, he was even a joke in the early 90's rap scene. When he attempted a comeback changing genre to nu-metal his producer later admitted that he only took the job because he thought that if Vanilla Ice was playing nu-metal it wouldn't be cool anymore. The film itself is actually even more atrocious than I could ever have imagined and kicks off with a five minute performance by Ice unrelated to the main plot and punctuated by a gunshot following which the dope with the schizophrenic hair speeds off on his motorbike for a spot of slow-motion horse bothering. I shit you not. Things only go downhill from there but perhaps the strangest thing is that however cool Ice considers himself everyone else looks at him with a mixture of bewilderment and exasperation, it's like a camel has walked into the room and repeated a Mitt Romney speech. In fact the only person who agrees that he's hip is under ten. I really don't know what's worse: Ice's gangsta patter, the scene where, unarmed and alone, he beats down four baseball bat wielding college boys, the sudden changes in clothing and sets as conversations continue, the moment when he breaks into love interest Kathy's bedroom (he's only met her the previous day) and lays on her bed waiting to greet her when she wakes up or the lack of any sign of trauma from kidnapped child Tommy after he's saved. Calling this the most abysmal film I've ever seen seems a slightly hollow statement so I'll just say this; it's worse than Emmanuelle vs. Dracula, another work based around gratuitous tits. The only points nearing entertainment are the house of the deranged elderly mechanic couple Ice crashes with inexplicably having literary quotes from Wilde and Ibsen painted all over the walls, the casting of Candy Clark from The Man Who Fell To Earth as Kathy's mother, how much the two comedy villains resemble Larry David and Jeff Garlin and the moment the film mercifully ends. I'd rather fellate a beehive than watch this again.

RAPPERS IN FILM