Ice Cream Man

Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man isn’t a remake of the 1995 direct-to-video slasher of the same name, a cult classic starring Clint Howard as a demented purveyor of frozen sweet treats. No, Roth’s movie is about a different killer who drives around in an old-timey ice cream truck, except this one serves up frosty confections with an added brainwashing ingredient. The result is somewhere between a modern-day Pied Piper yarn and a riff on both Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), conceived by Roth and co-written with his longtime friend Noah Belson. Suitably gory and meant more for laughs than scares, Ice Cream Man finds Roth leaning into his inner William Castle, presenting the movie in “S’Cream-O-Vision” and with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor throughout. But compared to some of Roth’s other, more mean-spirited work, it’s far more palatable. 

To be sure, Roth’s particular brand of horror movie often involves horrible things happening to insufferable characters. His debut feature, Cabin Fever (2002), found a group of asshole twentysomethings exposed to a flesh-eating virus. He followed that with two Hostel features in 2005 and 2007, both about asshole twentysomethings who find themselves captives in an Eastern European underground marketplace, where high-paying customers torture and kill unsuspecting tourists. Later, he made The Green Inferno (2013), an homage to Ruggero Deodato, Umberto Lenzi, and Joe D’Amato, following a group of asshole twentysomethings trying to save the rainforest only to be captured by an indigenous tribe of cannibals. In these movies and others, Roth reveals a conservative streak, as well as his contempt for privileged young people he wants to see torn to shreds (he once said Greta Thunberg should be “eaten by cannibals”). It’s as though he sets out to offend his audience’s sensibilities, and the outcome is usually tiresome in its transparent aggression. 

Admittedly, Roth’s career has been a downer. Out of his eleven fiction features, I’ve enjoyed one: his rewatchable slasher Thanksgiving (2023)—an extension of his faux trailer in Grindhouse (2007). He followed that with the abysmal Borderlands (2024), a disappointing video game adaptation with an A-list cast. Ice Cream Man is one of his better efforts. It doesn’t carry Roth’s usual scorn for his characters, which at least makes the experience easier to stomach than most of his other efforts. The movie opens in Bayleen Bay, a town with hints of 1950s innocence and contemporary cynicism that could only exist in a movie. At the local park, kids play Little League baseball, jump rope, and Pin the Tail on the Donkey, even though they have smartphones in their pockets. It’s unbelievable. Then a mysterious ice cream truck, operated by a creep in a paper hat (Ari Millen), arrives on the scene. The children flock to the truck to check out his menu items, all weirdly named after creepy crawlies. 

Later that night, a mysterious signal appears on everyone’s devices: an ice cream truck jingle, accompanied by a black-and-white cartoon that might’ve aired during Leave It to Beaver. The signal turns anyone who consumed the cursed desserts into a mindless drone who either force-feeds ice cream to or slaughters anyone not already turned. A few children escape the bloodbath that comes next. There’s the preadolescent Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), whose lactose intolerance means he skipped the ice cream. Roth finds a troubling silver lining to bulimia in Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), a 12-year-old who purged herself of the ice cream and was spared the mind control. Jared’s teen sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) also avoids succumbing to the spell by making herself puke. Along with another survivor, Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly), those saved from the mind-altering ingredients try to survive the destruction of their town by exceedingly violent children. 

With ice cream and sprinkles slathered on their faces, the programmed children see cartoon nightmares playing in their heads while finding creative ways to tear adults to shreds. They use baseball bats, dental equipment, power tools, paper cutters, and science books. The joke here, I guess, is that Roth has placed children and the child actors playing them into horrifying situations. It’s funny because it’s so wrong. In a sick and twisted way, it’s fun to watch child actors perform unspeakably gory acts: scooping out the principal’s brain, jumping rope with intestines, and playing tag with a severed hand. As young performers, they’re probably having a blast playing with gallons of fake blood and prosthetic appendages. And moreover, the viscera is refreshingly practical and goopy, whereas other details, such as sweeping shots of homes on fire, are rendered with subpar CGI. Much of this has a passable low-budget horror appeal, until Roth derails the movie’s survival momentum with an overlong exposition dump, which ultimately proves false and feels like a detour designed to pad the 86-minute runtime. 

Roth’s formal approach has always been solid, and his ability to shoot and edit an effective scene is on full display here. For instance, the director includes an amusing nod to the “Risseldy-Rosseldy” sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), except with demented children accumulating on a playground instead of birds. Ice Cream Man is a convincingly assembled nightmare that horror fanatics will probably enjoy for its sheer gross-out factor. But as with most of Roth’s output, the problem lies in the screenplay. The uneven third act is the movie’s weakest, leaving the viewer feeling deflated after an hour of lowbrow genre laughs. Curiously, the most inspired section of the movie might come at the end, with its stylized end credits and catchy song by Snoop Dogg. Alas, Ice Cream Man doesn’t quite reach the B-movie heights of Thanksgiving, but it’s not another harsh, unappetizing effort by the desperate-to-offend filmmaker either.