BY JERRY ROBERTS

October 1, 2002

Personally, I rarely refer to him as Vanilla Ice.

Yes, Vanilla Ice, the man of a thousand bad laughs. The man who took one hit single and tried to turn it into a million dollar merchandising coup. The man who came and went faster then the Gotta Have It card. The man of such intellectual wittcisms as "Yo! Vanilla Ice melts in a ya mouf not in ya hand! Knowutumsayin'!" The man who recently gave a free concert and threw copies of his new album into the audience only to have the audience throw them back!

One would be hard pressed to find a flash-in-the-pan celebrity who proved his non-talent more then this knucklebeak. After proving that he can't dance, can't rap, can't grasp basic street lingo and can't keep his stories straight, he tried acting. Well, not really acting, his movie Cool As Ice was more of a 90 minute ad for British Knights . . . and Benetteton and Rayban and Ninja and The Gap as well as Ice himself. It is a movie that not only proves that he is not an actor but also not James Dean (we knew that, but did he?)

Cool As Ice is a cycle yarn that stars The Sealtest Man as a motorcycle-riding bad boy named Johnny who (despite having no job) rides an expensive yellow bike and sports a new outfit every time we see him - one more ridiculous then the last. He comes barreling into town wit his homies set just the right distance away from him so that we know that they are together but our eyes don't wander away from Mr. Wonderful.

Almost immediately he runs into Kathy his love interest, literally, after knocking her off her horse into to the mud (couldn't he just say "hi"?). She falls madly in love with this God of the iron horse because, well, because he's Vanilla Ice, ya know. This romance isn't exactly ignited by fireworks:

Kathy: "So, where you from?"

Ice: "Around"

Kathy: "Around?"

Ice: "Yup"

[cut to V.I. squinting and posing]

I should point out that scenes of Ice's nobility are always followed by the same shot: Ice, astride his beloved bike is bathed in Heavenly sunlight as he squints his eyes and purses his lips while looking into the distance as the ethereal refrains of his soundtrack envelope him. If he weren't too cool to speak, you could almost hear his touching sermon: "Yo! Thou shalt bestow thy word unto thy mutha!"

The messiah's love interest is a squeaky clean college hopeful of the 1600-SAT persuasion. She appears too smart to be swooned by this lunkhead but if she didn't her father wouldn't have a reason to hate our hero and the movie would be a music video (which, in fact, it already is). Her father is played by Michael Gross, late of "Family Ties", who has some troubles that have put him in the Witness Relocation Program. And just so we won't miss a single cliché, Kathy also has a butt-head of a boyfriend, a rich kid who hates the hero because that's what butt-head boyfriends in the movies are made for.

Oh, and the guys that are looking for Kathy's father find Kathy's father. This looks like a job for Super Ice! Ice goes into Karate kickin' mode when he catches them messing with his bike - Oh what a noble one is this? Anyway, bad guys fall, Kathy swoons, Daddy relents and the movie down in a blaze of bad box office. But not before an endless series of credits featuring at least three more of Ice's songs and an endless
series of thank you's to the financiers that made Ice the cultural icon (read: cash cow) that we knew before the realization that Vanilla Ice was full of crap all along.

In the movie he jives about being "dissed" and it would be a portence of things to come. Nowadays Ice has dropped the "Vanilla" from his name and has turned hardcore gangsta metal rap artist thingamabob. He has cast off the image of a ridiculous rap star in glittery pants for an image of a ridiculous rap star with tattoos and a tank top and all memories of a movie like "Cool As Ice" are purely coincidental, knowutumsayin'!