YMMV / Cool as Ice

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Ice at one point has the price tag still on his hat. This was actually popular in hip-hop circles in the early 90s. It was done to make sure everyone knew how expensive your designer name-brand clothing was.
• Angst? What Angst?: Minutes after being repeatedly threatened by two thugs who kidnapped him from his own home, Tommy is showing off his new haircut to his mother and telling her to "chill."
  • To a lesser extent, the rest of the family. After all they went through that night, they're all pretty blithe about Kathy deciding to ride off with Johnny minutes after being reunited.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Once the bad guys are found at the end, the resulting brawl lasts about 30 seconds.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: During the montage where Johnny laments his troubles with Kathy, the number randomly cuts to shots of Kathy's house, complete with interior shots, an empty porch swing, etc., all filled with the same commercial-like quality as the rest of the product.
• Bile Fascination: Its reputation as a major box office flop as well as its unparalleled levels of Totally Radical has definitely earned it this. And that's to say nothing of its bizarre editing and plot.
• Designated Hero: Johnny, so very much. He introduces himself to his Love Interest Kathy by jumping over a fence in front of her while she's riding a horse, causing her to fall off and almost injure herself, then flippantly refusing to apologise. He then proceeds to stalk her and play the Stalking is Love trope painfully straight, coming onto her aggressively and flippantly disregarding her understandable reluctance to be around him and her father's wishes for him to not be around her. (And then proves him entirely right by breaking into their home and feeding her an ice cube to wake her up.) Somebody needs to learn what boundaries are. In fact, if there wasn't a worse villain in the movie that he happened to be able to foil, he would be the villain of this story. It's made worse by the fact that Vanilla Ice's acting could be charitably described as limited, which ends up making the whole thing implode around him with his charisma-free performance.
• Fight Scene Failure: The scene where the crooks capture Kathy's brother. And just wait till Johnny and his crew catch up to the crooks at the climax.
• Funny Moments: Kathy's little brother Tommy is actually kinda funny, and definitely the funniest character in the movie. Especially when he catches Johnny and Kathy about to do something very illicit.
• Ham and Cheese: Sydney Lassick as Roscoe, and Dody Goodman as Mae, make the most of it and wind up as two of the most likable characters.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One could be forgiven for feeling some sympathy for the devil, when you hear Johnny tell Kathy his ideology: "If you ain't true to yourself, you ain't true to nobody. Live your life for someone else, you ain't living." Years separated from his peak of notoriety, Vanilla Ice himself would hold a grudge against SBK Records (now defunct) for making him adopt a more commercial, MC Hammer-like image, and even falsifying a biography about him. The resulting damage to his credibility would haunt Vanilla Ice for the rest of his life.
• Ho Yay: The dance moves Ice and a backup dancer perform in the epilogue gets pretty...crotchy. They're in a 69 at one point. No, seriously.
• Just Here for Godzilla: If nothing else, the dancing is pretty damn good.
• Memetic Molester: Johnny himself, for playing Stalking is Love extremely straight and obsessively pursuing a girl who he almost crippled in their first meeting. It's not helped by the scene where he wakes her up by breaking into her house and slipping an ice cube into her mouth while standing over her bed. And then there's how he dances with her at the local club, which amounts to him grinding on her and even straddling her. Yeeeeesh.
• Narm: In abundance; this flick is up there with Showgirls for narm-y goodness. But to name a few moments...
  • The opening dance number, where Ice busts a dope rhyme with the tag still on his hat (this was an actual trend at the time. Needless to say, it did not age well).
  • "Where you going?" "Across the street to, uh, schling a schlong." Even the old lady says "What?" in justified confusion.
  • "Drop that zero and get with the hero." What's funny is that sounds more like something a villainous Jerk Jock would say rather than the main character.
  • During his performance at the local club: "I'm gonna drop some funky lyrics."
  • Better still, just look at the crowd. Where the hell are they, Nerdsville?
  • The scene where Johnny somehow jumps the fence on a motorcycle without any sort of ramp. And then knocks Kathy off her horse, in a candidate for the worst Meet Cute in all of cinema.
  • The "climactic" fight scene, complete with random sound effects and whiplash editing that turn the bad guys into Anticlimax Bosses.
  • The "date" at the construction site where they do little more than dance through a housing structure.
  • The kidnapping scene.
  • One of the crooks (the balding one) is so immature and dorky, you have to wonder how he got on America's Most Wanted to begin with.
  • "Lookie, lookie, lookie, in Kat's black bookie." Our Badass Biker, everybody.
  • The threatening phone call the dad has while you hear the music from Super Mario Bros. 3 in the background.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • The cinematographer for this film? None other than Academy Award winner Janusz Kaminski.
  • The director of this film? David Kellogg, whose only other film credit is Inspector Gadget (1999). Especially notable as the film's choppy editing and use of cartoonish sound effects are also present in this project, which he would later disown. He even cast the chubby antagonist in this film as one of the escaped prisoners in Inspector Gadget.
  • During the "U don't know me at all" clip, One of Kat's friends talking about her relationship problems is played by Kathryn Morris, who would later play the main lead of Cold Case.
• So Bad, It's Good: This is definitely one for 'Bad Movie Night'.
• Strangled by the Red String: Literally Kathy and Johnny's entire romance. She goes from righteously pissed off at him - after he causes her to fall off a horse, mind you - to chuckling at his patented witticisms in the next scene, and she remains transfixed by him through thick and thin.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • One of the odder aspects of this movie. There is almost no humor in it at all (aside from what's unintentional humor). Everyone was taking the Vanilla Ice movie way too seriously.
  • Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is inspired throughout, and it's probably the most consistently praised aspect of the film by critics.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Even aside from Ice himself, the fashions, music, and general culture on display makes it an almost flash-frozen time capsule of 1991.
• Values Dissonance: Johnny's courting of Kathy wasn't actually all that acceptable then either, but the fact that these are the actions of the hero says a lot. Nowadays this is nothing but straight up sexual harassment and stalking. The fact that she ends up saying yes afterward is also not a message that is likely to be encouraged today.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: It being a blatant product of the nineties, this was bound to be the case. Special mention goes to practically every outfit Johnny wears, the pièce de résistance being this orange/technicolor suit he wears in the Dance Party Ending.

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