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When you hear Eli Roth’s name, what title comes to mind first? Cabin Fever; Hostel; The Green Inferno; Thanksgiving? Everyone’s flavor of exploitation cinema is different, and Roth’s sampled them all. But there’s added pressure on his new sweet treat chiller, Ice Cream Man. Not only does Roth hope to add another fan-favorite massacre to his filmography, but it’s also his first directorial release under The Horror Section, his newer-to-market media company. It’s a sprinkle-dusted snapshot of what Roth considers, and I quote, the “world’s premier genre brand.” Too bad, since Ice Cream Man is a rancid attempt to turn kids homicidal in an ultra-gory throwback to cheesy 80s midnighters driven by rubbery, latex-wrapped practical SFX.
Canadian indie-horror mainstay Ari Millen stars as a traveling “Ice Cream Man” who rolls into the postcard-perfect town of Bayleen Bay. It’s an idyllic slice of suburbia where giggly children jump rope and ride bicycles without a care in the world. You get the vibe that nothing bad ever happens in Bayleen Bay, at least until Millen’s dessert distributor—who goes by the name Jonathan Smiley—starts selling his frozen goodness. Any child who eats a “Serpent Swirl” or “Billy Goat Bar” begins acting funny, their lips stained with sticky ice cream goo … and then they murder their parents.
Roth’s sloppy sundae of a violent horror comedy puts his spin on Cooties or The Children, where innocent lil’ kiddos become savage psycho killers. It’s a tasty concept, and has nothing to do with 1995’s Ice Cream Man starring Clint Howard, but don’t get excited. Roth is no amateur, and yet Ice Cream Man feels like a short film concept laboriously stretched to barely ninety minutes with irredeemably amateurish methods. The movie looks bad, sounds bad, performances are bad, and it’s like Roth doesn’t care. He’s just here to turn playgrounds into slaughter fields littered with body parts, while the rest of his production suffers.
Aesthetic aims for Pleasantville vibes—chipper sitcom scoring, performatively bright sunshine, hospitality on overdrive—so the ensuing mayhem can juxtapose feral evil against small-town idealism. It’s been done plenty of times, but looks awful here, as overexposed lighting washes out vibrant colors, or dopey background tracks stumble with a hackey brightness that doesn’t always fit darkly comedic presentations. The atmospheric ruse Roth tries to achieve is a blistering distraction that comes off as horrendously inadequate and lazily unpolished. It’s clear that Ice Cream Man is a low-budget picture, but Roth burst onto the scene with Cabin Fever, another money-tight production that he’s able to wrangle into a tight and cohesive vision.
Apologies for being a bit cruel here given the majority underage cast, but Ice Cream Man is pure torture whenever Roth doesn’t have Applied Arts FX Studio to lean on. For example, there’s an early scene where groups of background actors had clearly been instructed to pretend to lick fake ice cream cones (presumably props that wouldn’t melt). It’s laughable how many kids are goofily licking the air or staring directly into the camera, ruining the moment. Sure, you can argue Roth’s focus here is to make something entertaining and deranged, perhaps even leaning into surreality as a B-movie trope, but that’s not what’s sold. It comes off as untrained kids pulled off the street reading cringeworthy dialogue that’s shot by a filmmaker who just needs to fill narrative space before the next mutilation. There is no breakout role or saving presence. The quality bar is in hell, and yet Roth still manages to bump his head over and over again, slinking in way under already non-existent expectations.
Ice Cream Man puts all its eggs into the “dead parents” basket, so if there’s one hero, it’s Applied Arts FX Studio. Roth lets kids be kids, even though they’re sawing off mommy’s head with a hacksaw, or scooping the principal’s brains into a waffle cone. There are some pretty awesome deaths as a trio of uninfected, lactose-intolerant students flees from their possessed, rage-virus-like classmates who are tearing apart any adults they see. It’s all silly as heck since Roth wants to emulate that throwback horror feel of over-the-top savagery using as much practical application as possible, which is one of the few things that works about Ice Cream Man. Roth and co-writer Noah Belson dream up a slew of demented fatalities that turn bodies into piles of mushy, bleeding remains, with Applied Arts FX Studio not wanting to waste even a droplet of fake blood.
That said, with only a single redeeming quality about Ice Cream Man, the negatives rattle on for days. These Cuphead-esque cartoons and animated tidbits pop in to accentuate the Ice Cream Man‘s Pied Piper-like song (a Saturday Morning sing-along type), which should be rad, but fit weirdly given how digital crispness clashes with the schlock-jock nature of the surrounding film. Snoop Dogg drops a closing-credits track that legit feels like he spent two minutes in the studio and laid a stinker. Millen doesn’t have a character to play; he stands there with an off-putting grin in his paper server’s hat without an iota of menace. It’s all so phony; technique becomes an afterthought. Even the ice cream mess around the mouths of sugar-rushing youths looks like a dusting of cheap makeup, plucked out of some production assistant’s pocket.
Plain and simple, Ice Cream Man is a slapdash stinker that’s not worth the brainfreeze. It’s like Roth forgot to put his film in the freezer, and all the decorative appeal, or any valuable substance, melted away. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good kill-em-all flick that doesn’t give a hoot about delivering Oscar-worthy dramatics. But the problem with Ice Cream Man isn’t that gore overshadows mediocre plotting. Ice Cream Man is downright pitiful at being anything other than a highlight reel of child-on-adult brutality—no rich fudgy decadence that hugs your soul, no refreshing sensation, and certainly no cherry on top to brag about.
Movie Score: 1.5/5
