THE STORY – An idyllic suburban town descends into madness when a mysterious ice cream man serves sweet treats that turn children into homicidal maniacs.
THE CAST – Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Sarah Abbott & Benjamin Byron Davis
THE TEAM – Eli Roth (Director/Writer) & Noah Belson (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 86 Minutes
Eli Roth’s name has become synonymous with a specifically gleeful brand of horror filmmaking. This sensibility peaked with his 2023 film “Thanksgiving,” a triumph of clever kills and genuine hilarity, managing to feel both comfortingly old-fashioned in its sensibilities and refreshingly contemporary in its approach. After a brief detour away from horror with the infamous flop “Borderlands,” Roth is back in his lane with “Ice Cream Man,” a film as proudly childish in its attitude as the typical customer base of the titular profession. This is certainly nothing new for Roth, who has never prided himself as a bastion of maturity or sensitivity. But with “Ice Cream Man,” the sense of purpose that all films need in order to feel like anything other than a diversion is completely absent. This hollowness isn’t helped by the lazy filmmaking, including the most egregious usage of AI-created imagery I’ve ever seen in a production at this level.
In the concoction of this cinematic sundae, Roth and his co-writer Noah Belson take a healthy scoop of “Night of the Living Dead,” cover it with “It,” dip it in “Weapons,” and sprinkle some “Nightmare on Elm Street” on top. Although given the quality of the execution of these elements, they clearly went for the flavorless, sugar-free options. The actual Ice Cream Man himself is played by Ari Millen, who has a great face for horror but is forced to play a character with little specificity or direction other than “smile menacingly.” The film introduces him as he pulls up in his truck to a Little League baseball game, dispensing treats to the young ballplayers. Notably, the one kid who doesn’t grab an ice cream cone is our lactose-intolerant hero Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), or “Jarhead” as his older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) calls him. His body’s rejection of dairy turns out to be a blessing, as all the children in his hyper-idyllic town who consume the ice cream eventually click into a zombie-like state, focused solely on killing the adults around them in as violent a way as possible.
The day after these youths go on a nocturnal rampage in their homes, they dutifully shuffle to school, their mouths covered in ice cream and their eyes blank. Apparently, the ice cream man went on a very productive ride through the town, as seemingly every child is affected except for Jared and two others: Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman). This trio of non-stupified kids takes it upon themselves to find a way to stop the carnage, fighting their way out of a school-wide massacre that takes a full 30 minutes, or about one-third of the film’s runtime. It’s undoubtedly the movie’s creative high point, and it’s easy to imagine that Roth built the entire story around this gigantic, bloody set piece (the propulsive rock music underscoring most of it seems to indicate how much fun Roth had constructing this sequence). The kills are gnarly and unquestionably creative (I’ll never look at a seesaw the same way again), but without a worthwhile story or characters to care about surrounding the brutality, the entire endeavor feels as empty as the calories in a Klondike bar.
There’s not much to be said about the performances of the young actors tasked with leading the film, aside from acknowledging that they’re given little chance to show off their collective prowess thanks to awfully simplistic and clichéd dialogue. And it’s not just the young ones who are tasked with this level of uninspired writing. The adults of the town are beyond clueless and unpleasantly dim-witted; when one of the teachers grows tired of his unresponsive students, he yells, “Is this some sort of zombie pajama day challenge?” Awkward, unfunny dialogue like this is abundant throughout the film. The world of “Ice Cream Man” is a mean, shallow one, with little in the movie in the way of compelling motivation or even a shadow of pathos. The only scene with a sliver of humanity is a brief, charming dinner table scene early in the film between Jared, Lizzie, and their parents (Karen Cliche and Roth himself). Here, the bond between the four is evident, building a necessary, endearing energy that’s essential for story pay-off purposes revealed later. But it’s the singular moment in the film concerned with anything other than making the audience wince or sardonically laugh in glee at the gore.
And it’s not just the characters that lack humanity. Throughout the film, viewers are deluged by an onslaught of obnoxious, AI-generated imagery that’s beyond distracting in its falseness. The children of the town become obsessed with an old-timey cartoon set to the ice cream man’s creepy jingle, watching it on their pads and phones, and any audience member who’s spent more than two minutes on the site formerly known as Twitter will immediately identify these cartoons as material purloined and reconstructed by AI. The same is true of an unsightly flashback sequence later in the film that explains the villain’s origin; rather than actually shoot this segment using living actors, the team behind this film instead chose to give that job to generative software. The film doesn’t hide this fact, crediting the visual effects to Dark Half, an AI VFX company. If Roth was hoping to capture classic splatter film vibes with “Ice Cream Man,” the use of ugly, anti-art tools like this makes this goal completely unreachable.
The most successful overly-nasty films in cinematic history all manage to have something to say about the human condition or state of the world simmering underneath all of the blood and guts on display, no matter how ridiculous the subject matter. Think “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or “Saw” – legendarily uncompromising films that balance their savagery with metaphors and messages that have been discussed at length in the years since their releases. Or, at the very least, the best films of this ilk showcase a level of inventive ingenuity in the filmmaking, such as with “Terrifier 2.” With its use of AI, “Ice Cream Man” squanders any chance of being praised for anything in it that approaches creative achievement. “Ice Cream Man” isn’t interested in being considered as anything other than a delivery vehicle for shock, just as an ice cream van is never going to offer anything of actual substance. And that may be enough for some bloodthirsty filmgoers, but it’s certainly not going to last in anyone’s imagination longer than the length of a simple sugar rush.
