Director Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man was set in an idyllic suburban town called Bayleen Bay descends into madness when a mysterious ice cream man serves sweet treats that turn children into homicidal maniacs/zombies intent on killing any and all adults. The premise was just that simple; no adult was safe. But was it enough to satisfy those cinematic sweet cravings?
I would say maybe, in some cases throughout Ice Cream Man. The overall production executed a vision of being a body gore fest. If you have seen the end of Weapons, then this movie played heavily into the gag of children murdering people. From the gummy brains to the long sausage intestines, the buckets of prop blood were endless. The practicality and planning behind each kill was a wide variety, versus the kids killing the adults by simply ripping them apart. At one point, I think I was staring at a vibrant red fruit salad floating within a caved-in dummy head.
Essentially, the creativity of death was that of Home Alone traps, and the brutality was reminiscent of Terrifier—minus the nudity. The makeup department was flexing on their skills with all of the fake ice cream on the kids’ faces and clothes. Roth’s other horror films like Thanksgiving or even the dreaded Borderlands always have a throughline of great makeup and costuming. If you just want to watch set pieces of little children skipping a rope made of their teacher’s innards, by all means, this is the movie for you.
Visually, I appreciated how the film showed when the children had turned. However, it should have used better blocking to explain why the uninfected characters could not tell who was infected. Otherwise, it looked as though the parents had neglected to clean their children or the teachers considered faces caked in ice cream an everyday occurrence. I understood the vision, but it could have been executed much better.
The production did nothing to distract from the bizarre, nails-on-a-chalkboard writing. Roth and Noah Belson wrote some atrocious jokes in Ice Cream Man, if they can even be called jokes, that left me shaking my head during almost every scene. The film even added text that read, “Filmed in Scream-o-vision,” ensuring a cheap, cheesy joke was always waiting around the next corner. Roth and Karen Cliche’s characters also make painfully bad ice cream puns that are so cringeworthy they could send a chill through your bones, which serves as Exhibit A. Why was a Mitt Romney joke beaten into the ground? Who knows?
“Ice Cream Man is one of those films you go see while making out with Johnny Whats-it, the enforcer on the high school hockey team, at the back of the theatre.”
The biggest sin of Ice Cream Man was its lore-building and the inconsistent power scaling of the possessed children. With a backstory steeped in the occult and a wild explanation for why events unfold as they do, I did not expect to have my flabbers gasted by a massive lore dump delivered through a 30-second montage and convoluted exposition. The information arrived so abruptly that the scene felt forced, as though Roth and Belson could not agree on where to place it or how else to justify what was happening to the children.
The possessed children’s strength was inconsistent. At times, they could crush someone’s head, while in other scenes they could only knock someone down. The only consistent element was the film’s commitment to its ice cream theme. The ice cream truck had an iconic design, but Ari Millen’s portrayal of the Ice Cream Man was open to interpretation, to say the least. He had no dialogue and communicated mainly through mime, which made his pursuit scenes feel more awkward than frightening. He was not an effective slasher villain. Would I place him on the Mount Rushmore of horror antagonists alongside Pennywise and Art the Clown? Probably not.
Throughout the whole movie, I was wondering who the target audience would be for this piece of media. It cannot be for kids because there was a lot of foul language, and the killings were disturbingly graphic. For an adult or parent, Ice Cream Man bordered between gut-wrenching and silliness. I could not help but face palm at every death or laugh at how ridiculous the plot unwrapped itself.
Ice Cream Man is the kind of film you see while making out with Johnny Whats-it, the enforcer on the high school hockey team, in the back row of the theatre. It has the sort of perceived edginess that could make a tween or teen feel as though they were sneaking into an adults-only movie for the first time. The film’s real crime against accuracy is that not a single vape appears anywhere.
Almost nothing could save Ice Cream Man. I would only recommend this film to those who have nothing better to watch at the cinema, and have an attraction to torture/murder porn. If Roth was hoping to strike gold like Curry Barker’s Obsession earlier this year, then his aspirations were supremely high with this film. While the movie has a fun-looking vibe, it never felt close to other children’s/teen adventure stories like Attack the Block or The Goonies. It also tried to be like It, but lost the plot somewhere. If this was the soft-serve narrative they thought was groundbreaking, the story was quite flaccid.
God knows how Roth got Snoop Dogg to make a track for this movie! Please enjoy this movie responsibly…one lick at a time. Or run away, do not talk to strangers, definitely do not consume this ice cream, and go live a happy life without witnessing this feature.
