There’s no way you’re going to go and watch the Vanilla Ice movie “Cool as Ice,” but if you were, I’d suggest first cuing up this clip from 1999, from MTV special “25 Lame,” in which visibly nervous comedians Jon Stewart, Denis “NyQuil” Leary, Janeane Garofalo and Chris “Mango” Kattan destroy music videos the then-still-playing-music-video channel was “retiring.” As they bring on Robert Van Winkle himself, Garofalo slices open the femoral artery of blame: “It’s MTV’s fault for overplaying [him].” Wham. Her co-panelists know she’s right, too. Leary effaces himself before the former punch-line, telling him, “I never got laid off the ‘Asshole’ video.” Still, boiling with hatred for the joke he had been at the age of 19, Van Winkle not only gladly destroys his tape, he takes a bat to the entire set, Stewart calmly retrieving from the ground the unbroken middle of a lava lamp as popcorn and bits of beanbag chair go flying.

Here’s the important part of that video: Vanilla Ice was 19 when that catchy video blew up. Nineteen. He looked like an idiot — as I did and you did and everybody does when they’re 19 — but his stylized cockiness was on display for the whole world, which delighted in watching his career inevitably turn into drugs, depression and the D-list.

That rollercoaster was just about to crest when groaning parents and scoffing teans learned, in 1991, that Ice would be starring in a musical romance doomed to be an out-loud laugh-fest in its most serious moments. “Cool as Ice” is about as cool as a summer episode of “Saved By the Bell.” It knows it, too. Heading up his dance posse on a Suzuki sport bike, Ice and pals leave a dance practice and drive until it’s morning, when he spots a girl on a horse and decides to impress her or put her in a non-responsive coma by jumping a fence in front of her. Without a ramp, too.

Getting the “jumping the shark” part out of the way early on in “Cool as Ice.”

When one of the bikes breaks down, the posse has to spend a few days with Ice’s wacky bike-repairing grandparents in their quirky neon home. Luckily, “the chick who drives the horse” (Ice’s words) happens to live across the street, her douchey, whisky-drinking boyfriend regularly sniffing around her picket fences, hoping to get her to give up her virginity. I mean, he drives a Corvette convertible, so what’s taking her so long? Ice senses a challenge, and attempts to woo the girl, Kathy (Kristen Minter) with his break dancing, slangy yet mostly curse-free talk (“Drop that zero and get with the hero”) and fashion choices. These include: a gold hoop earring, lines shaved into his eyebrows, Gaultier sunglasses, a black pleather hat with mirror panels on it, bricks and lightning bolts shaved into his frosted hair, a black and white jacket with “Down by Law” and “Sex Me Up” written on it, too-short neon pants and not one but TWO pairs of striped short-overalls with the straps dangling down.

And this is why no one wears Stussy anymore.

What makes “Cool as Ice” work (and yes, I did just say it works) is that poor Ice, even doing all his own bike stunts, really does look un-cool. It’s 1991, the height of when his horribly questionable fashion and personal style was being aspired to by kids across the country, and yet no one pretends to be scared or shocked by his faux-urban exterior. They’re sneering. He might as well be dressed like Steve Urkel. It feels like Ice knows he’s not being fashion forward, and that he’s proud to be wearing clothing that makes people people burst into laughter because he’s being true to himself. Considering his look was cool for just about as long as the “Under Pressure” sample that provides the foundation of “Ice Ice Baby,” that’s sort of admirable. He’s not a cool rebel. He’s not dangerous, or a cad, either: he shows up just in time to save Kathy from a couple of gangsters after her dad (her family is in the Witness Protection Program for the most flimsy reasons possible, part of what makes Ice one of the more innocent participants in this cut-rate drama), and the next day they dance and jump around a construction site. He feeds her horse a carrot and he teaches her how to ride his Lego-colored plastic bike. She’s the one who grabs and kisses him — and their romance goes no further, even when he crawls through her window into her all-white lace and teddy bear virgin kingdom of a bedroom. As totally typical this movie is on paper, this movie is affectionately strange in execution: Ice’s heroic moment in the movie, saving Kathy’s kid brother because her idiot father’s old associates find the family, isn’t based on swagger — it’s because he can listen critically to idiosyncrasies in a cassette tape.

“Kathy, you’re to stay a virgin and keep studying for college. Which is why we’ve decorated your room like a Honeymoon Suite, complete with fresh white flowers and champagne flutes.”

Yeah, we all had to listen to “Ice Ice Baby” played several billion times, but those radio stations wouldn’t have put it on if callers weren’t clamoring for it. And watching “Cool as Ice,” directed by a guy who got most his experience on Playboy video shoots and written by another guy whose experience is in writing TV episodes — it’s hard not to feel sort of protective for Ice, who in truth was a fatherless, rootless white kid who got into poetry, rap and breakdancing when the rest of the country was enthralled with disco. He dropped out of high school, but wrote his biggest hit, earned a couple of motorcycle titles, opened for some of the biggest hip-hop and dance acts of the day and got stabbed in a brawl — just in his teens. That’s a better scholarship pitch and resume than “Cool as Ice“‘s Kathy. It’s a lot easier to roll our eyes at Ice’s dancing and rapping than to think about how much time he invested and teasing he endured in practicing any of it, a lot easier to guffaw at his fashion than to marvel at the guts of someone just becoming an adult who was willing to try anything, as much in fashion as in his career. When it comes to the aesthetically foul and wretched year of 1991, we are all guilty. Maybe “Cool as Ice” reminds us of that, and that’s why we hate it, and why 5,500 IMDb slacktivists have soothed their egos by down-voting “Cool as Ice” into the 2.3-stars-out-of-ten ratings territory. Click. “Take THAT, Vanilla Ice!” Really? Disdain is a heady opiate, but none of us gets anything out of bashing Vanilla Ice anymore. And if you think you do, that’s even sadder than an unused strap on a pair of overall-shorts.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.