In a sleepy small-town community, a mysterious Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) sells his frozen desserts to unsuspecting children. Soon, they are under his spell – and murdering all the adults.
There has been a vibe shift. And Eli Roth has been left behind. In the early 2000s, he was the enfant terrible of horror, a cine-savvy sadistic-splatter specialist who tapped into something cool and transgressive. Today, the landscape looks very different: horror films are now winning Oscars, outgrossing major franchises at the box office, and rich with grown-up themes. Ice Cream Man — a sugary riff on Children Of The Corn (Children Of The Cone?) — is Roth’s latest attempt to go back to his gory roots. After some odd recent diversions (the family-friendly fantasy The House With A Clock In Its Walls, the abysmal video-game adaptation Borderlands), it seems, along with 2023’s Thanksgiving, like a deliberate throwback to his noughties heyday, full of the gleeful gore and goofy tone that defined his biggest hits (Cabin Fever, Hostel).
But in every sense, this film feels out of time and place. The most exciting voices in horror are now 20-somethings from YouTube — the Philippous, the Barkers and the Parsons of the world. The torture-porn market has been sewn up by Damien Leone’s Terrifier series, which does practical effects more imaginatively and gruesomely than this. Even the very idea of ‘kids being possessed and turned into weapons’ has been recently executed far better, and more interestingly, in, erm, Zach Cregger’s Weapons.
The filmmaking feels genuinely unpleasant, even beyond the blood-and-guts stuff.
So, what are we left with? Well, first and foremost, a bloodthirsty premise. Indeed, that seems to be the only thing actually considered here, at the expense of almost everything else. It’s a straightforward genre conceit: a creepily cheery, pencil-moustached, Pee-wee Herman-esque ice cream vendor (Ari Millen, blameless) rolls into town one day and distributes ice cream to the community’s young population. Soon they become murderous zombies, who bend only to the never-speaking Ice Cream Man’s will. Cue an unremitting parade of crazy kills, performed by children too young to even get into a 12A.
Pretty standard stuff, but Roth seems to have arrived at his concept, his opportunity to indulge in a bit of bloody butchery, without ever properly thinking about a story, compelling characters, or even vaguely plausible dialogue. Scenes meander from A to B with no particular flow or motivation. Characters have no arcs, inner lives, or even discernible traits, beyond being fodder for death, or running away from it. The script is a genuinely head-scratching cobbled-together collection of sub-Joss Whedon attempts at wit. (At one point, a pre-teen child references the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross — because kids love Mamet, right?)
If you’re simply here for relentless, unthinking ultraviolence, you’ll be satisfied enough, sure. But it’s gore for the sake of gore. There is no care for actual story or character beats. No unfortunate soul is established well enough for us to ever care when they inevitably meet their grisly demise. At one point, a fireman comes to rescue the kids; naturally they smash his face in with bricks. Then, a paramedic is dragged along behind his own ambulance, to the screaming cheers of the zombie-fied children. Forget poetic justice, the film seems to say — it’s about time the emergency services get taken down a peg or two!
Roth’s horror films have always delighted in the nasty, but here the filmmaking feels genuinely unpleasant, even beyond the blood-and-guts stuff. Some characters are openly sexist (“Chicks are expensive!” muses one of our heroes). There is a casual use of an ableist slur, and a horrible, horrible ‘joke’ about bulimia, from a 12-year-old. That’s not even to mention the unforgivably anti-art use of glaringly obvious generative AI, across multiple sequences. If you can’t be bothered to hire human artists for your cheap, shallow, unthinking gore-fest, what are we even doing here?
Ugly, unpleasant and utterly insubstantial, this ice cream just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
