Cruel Summer

My thoughts on Ice Cream Man

Following the disastrous critical and commercial reception of his previous film, the misbegotten video game adaptation Borderlands, filmmaker Eli Roth has elected to go back to what he does (one hesitates to say “what he does best” in regards to the mind behind the Hostel films)—make a super-gory low-budget horror film with very little plotting to get in the way of the grisliness. In Ice Cream Man, a seemingly bucolic small town on the cusp of summertime is visited by an ice cream truck piloted by a mysterious and silent man (Ari Millen) dispensing sweet treats with strange names to most of the local kids. That night, the kids, apparently triggered by a combination of the ice cream and the music playing from the van, wake up and begin slaughtering their parents and teachers in any number of grotesque ways, only taking breaks to load up on more ice cream and to try to force the remaining kids who haven’t eaten any of it to dig in as well. Realizing that something is dreadfully wrong, three unaffected kids—including lactose-intolerant Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), not-so-secret crush Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) and pal Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly)—try to avoid both the ice cream man and his young followers and, with the help of Jared’s teenaged sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), try to figure out what is going on and if there is any way to stop the madness for good. At this point, I should perhaps point out that the film has no connection with the 1995 Clint Howard classic of the same name other than the shared title and the basic concept of a malevolent ice cream guy. Of course, if you know your weirdo horror movies, you have already figured that out. If you hadn’t, this might not be the movie for you.

Because it involves mysterious goings-on involving children and includes scenes in which adults are brutally slaughtered by kids, there will no doubt be some out there who will dismiss Ice Cream Man as being nothing more than a knock-off of last year’s surprise hit Weapons. Since it was already filming when that film hit last summer, that comparison would seem to be inaccurate, particularly since those horror buffs with longer memories will find it to be more of a riff on The Children, a peculiar 1980 cult favorite in which a bunch of cute kids get caught in a radioactive cloud and turn into toxic killers that can only be stopped by chopping off their hands, retold within a framework resembling one of those Stephen King short stories that he cranked out early in his career for the kind of magazines that one did not acquire for the articles or short fiction. In truth, I suspect that Roth’s real inspiration for making this film, despite his claims that it is something that he has been working on for over 20 years, is the unexpectedly popular Terrifier franchise, both in telling a story that involves an ever-smiling and always-silent killer and scenes bringing together extreme gore and young children and the way that it bypassed both the studios and the MPAA so as to supply as much viscera as possible without having to then cut it all out in order to get an R rating.

Of course, the story is little more than a pretense to present a seemingly endless array of scenes in which little kids chop people into pieces, scoop out their brains and even make the equivalent of snow angels in the ensuing pools of blood. It is certainly bloody enough to attract those for whom such a thing is an attraction but, perhaps inevitably, the brutality gets kind of monotonous after a while, especially since the plot ultimately proves to be a tired rehash of A Nightmare on Elm St. that doesn’t even make much sense on its own base level and concludes on a note that viewers might deem deeply unsatisfying if they gave a shit about any of it. Roth’s other deficiencies as a filmmaker are on display as well—he remains incapable of staging a scene that contains anything resembling suspense, the acting is largely lamentable (yes, most of the cast are kids but it feels as if they were recruited 10 minutes before shooting began), it looks cheap and borderline ghastly throughout and even at a relatively brief 86 minutes, it drags so unmercifully at times that all but the most undiscriminating gorehounds will no doubt find themselves checking their watches long before it arrives at its blessed ending.

Admittedly, I am not a fan of Roth’s films by any stretch of the imagination—the only ones I have liked were his off-beat Amblin family adventure tribute The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018) and his occasionally inspired Golden Age slasher homage Thanksgiving (2023)—and am not recommending this one by any stretch of the imagination. I will confess that this one comes closer to working that most of the other titles in his resume, although that says more about the woeful qualities of his filmography than anything else. The premise holds some intrigue, although he and co-writer Noah Belson never quite make much of it, there are a couple of funny moments here and there (there is an amusing scene in which the instructions for defeating the ice cream man are explained to the young heroes in increasingly complicated fashion) and some of the early kills—achieved largely through appropriately goopy practical makeup do demonstrate a certain heedlessness in their willingness to zoom beyond the parameters of good taste before lapsing into monotony. As a short film—perhaps a segment of a cut-rate version of Creepshow or an episode of that Masters of Horror series—there is a chance that Ice Cream Man might have had more punch to it, the horror film equivalent of the kind of instant sugar rush you get from an ice cream treat. As a feature, however, the film is an ugly and tedious excursion in gross out stupidity that is about as transgressive as a kid showing you his chewed-up food at the dinner table and as irritating and unappealing as a case of brain freeze.