Full Disclosure: A screener for “Rifftrax: Cool as Ice” was sent to us legally for review purposes.
Mocking “Cool as Ice” is a Herculean task even for the guys at Rifftrax. The movie is such a straight faced movie filled with inexplicable montages and horrific writing, not to mention star Vanilla Ice is such an empty void, it’s a challenge to ridicule him when the occasion calls for it. “Cool as Ice” is still as awful as ever, and while the episode from the Riff Trax gang isn’t their best, it’s still filled with a ton of one liners that will inspire raucous laughter.
“Cool as Ice” is such an empty void of film that not even I liked it when my dad rented it for my brother and I back in 1992. And we were hardcore Vanilla Ice fans, sad to say. The movie is a brutally surreal romance drama, and surely enough the gang are very much up to the task of mocking every ridiculous moment they can. There’s a hilarious running gag with the two thugs that are stalking Michael Gross’s character (“Michael Gross as guy taking this role to impress his eight year old son, and failing!”), that do nothing but eat burgers in front of their cars. There’s also a lot of really good laugh made at the expense of the creepy romance between Vanilla Ice and bland Kathy, a girl who finds it charming when a man breaks in to her room while she’s sleeping and stuffs objects in to her mouth playfully.
Star Ice also lacks any kind of enthusiasm on the screen, and performs much of his acting through his clothing and stiff expressions (“Eat My Raised Eyebrow of Judgment”). The Rifftrax gang are also in no shortage of jokes about how nineties the movie is, and they’re not wrong at all. The movie is so of its decade that it garners just about every fad and fashion you can imagine, from neon jackets, to the SNES (“Dan Cortese watching “Getting Even with Dad” with a Furby, while a pile of AOL floppies wearing Reebok pumps and hyper color shirts perform at Lilith Fair was less nineties than this.”). The episode for “Cool As Ice” doesn’t always hit its stride with some jokes falling flat, and the guys struggling in some instances, but it’s a very funny take down of a really bad movie that’s long overdue.