Starring Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer and Shiloh O’Reilly
Directed by Eli Roth
Written by Eli Roth and Noah Belson
The Horror Section
The VHS-themed logo for Eli Roth’s The Horror Section company at the head of ICE CREAM MAN establishes the vibe that the film to follow aims for. The intention is clearly to recapture the swift (ICE CREAM MAN runs 79 minutes plus credits), sick pleasures of the VHS horror era, when blood-and-gutsy fright flicks could be enjoyed on uncut, unrated tapes. Nowadays, as most conspicuously proven by the TERRIFIER films, unrated gorefests can successfully play theatrically as well, and no doubt the box-office returns of the Art the Clown saga helped Roth get ICE CREAM MAN (which he first conceived two decades ago) off the ground. It’s got plenty of extreme splatter, all right, but it peaks early in that department, and doesn’t offer enough else to compensate.
In the small town of Bayleen Bay, the local kids are happily playing baseball and doing other kid things when a mysterious ice cream truck rolls onto their streets. Its driver (Ari Millen) offers a full lineup of treats with dubious names like “Locust Lick,” “Creepy Crawly” and “Serpent Swirl,” but the children clamor for them anyway. Once they start talking, these youths prove to be the kind of foul-mouthed miniature adults common to films like this, complete with an early GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS namecheck. But all the swearing pales in comparison to the way they start behaving after they’ve sampled the Ice Cream Man’s wares. That night, they begin killing off their parents in all kinds of grotesque ways, and they subject their teachers to more extravagantly brutal fates the next day at school.
ICE CREAM MAN definitely gives the target audience what they want during this first half hour, as all manner of home and classroom implements are put to bodily and cranially destructive use. The practical makeup effects by Steve Newburn’s Applied Arts FX Studio and Oscar-winner Adrien Morot’s Morot FX are as disgustingly well-crafted as anyone could want. By that 30-minute mark, though, the film has played out almost all of its key setpieces, and Roth and Noah Belson’s script doesn’t have much of anywhere to go from there. It becomes the latest variation on 1978’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, as three unaffected kids—our hero Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), his pal Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and his crush object Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman)—are pursued by the ice-cream-infected little hordes, who emit unearthly screams. Elsewhere, one scene directly homages Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS, and the storyline bears a few accidental similarities to that of WEAPONS.
Familiarity isn’t the problem here, however; rather, it’s the lack of any truly interesting developments or explorations of its key theme. The tone is overall too jokey for the movie to sustain true suspense, and the deeper terror of parents being slaughtered by their offspring—and having to violently defend themselves—is almost completely eschewed. It’s all about the shock/black-comic value of little boys and girls gruesomely hacking up adult victims, and without anything of substance supporting it, a little of this red-drenched spectacle goes a long way.
For his part, the Ice Cream Man himself has disappointingly little to do; Millen has the right look and manner for the part, but plays only a small, functional, non-speaking role in most of the goings-on. Roth introduces the potentially intriguing gambit of the affected kids seeing themselves as cartoon characters punishing naughty animals (with Max Fleischer-style animation that has gotten him in hot cyber-water since it was revealed these clips employed generative AI), and then does little with it. Eventually, the film introduces a new character to provide an exposition dump about the Ice Cream Man’s background, which ties his history in with a real-life horror and leads to a resolution that is both predictable and vaguely implausible, even on the movie’s outlandish terms.
Based on a lot of on-line comments out there, it’s evidently worth repeating that this ICE CREAM MAN is related to neither the 1995 Clint Howard vehicle nor the Image comic-book series of the same title. Both have their fans, and those seeking a simple gross-out goof at the movies may be sated by Roth’s entry. It’s just too bad that a promising idea has here resulted in the cinematic equivalent of an insubstantial snack rather than a satisfying meal.
