Ice Cream Man Review

There are certain names in horror that come with expectations, and Eli Roth is unquestionably one of them. Whatever you think of his films individually, the director behind Cabin Fever, Hostel, Hostel: Part II and, more recently, Thanksgiving has rarely been afraid of blood, guts or pushing practical gore considerably further than most mainstream filmmakers would dare. With Ice Cream Man, Roth certainly hasn’t suddenly discovered restraint. Unfortunately, he seems to have misplaced quite a lot of everything else.

Set in the seemingly idyllic small town of Bayleen Bay, the film introduces a mysterious new Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) who arrives with a truck, an incredibly irritating earworm of a jingle and a selection of strangely named frozen treats. Naturally, the local children can’t get enough of them. Unfortunately for their parents, consuming the ice cream appears to transform the youngsters into murderous little monsters.

And they don’t exactly start small.

Before long, parents and teachers are being dispatched in increasingly horrific ways. Drills find their way into ears, heads are opened, brains are scooped out, limbs are removed and bodies are subjected to the kind of punishment that reminds you precisely who is sitting in the director’s chair. Roth has built much of his career around refusing to look away when other filmmakers might cut, and Ice Cream Man enthusiastically continues that tradition.

The practical gore is unquestionably where the film is at its strongest. Effects work from Steve Newburn’s Applied Arts FX Studio and Oscar winner Adrien Morot’s Morot FX provides exactly the kind of revolting physical carnage that audiences coming specifically for an Eli Roth splatter film will expect. There is something refreshing about seeing this much messy practical work thrown onto a cinema screen when so much modern horror relies heavily upon digital enhancement.

For the opening half-hour or so, there’s even some stupid fun to be had with it. The central concept is ridiculous, the deaths are knowingly excessive and Roth and co-writer Noah Belson lace the carnage with black comedy. One particularly grotesque visual gag has children essentially playing a game of Operation with a teacher’s body. If that sentence makes you laugh rather than recoil, you are probably somewhere close to the film’s intended audience.

The problem is that once you’ve seen murderous children brutally dispatching adults a few times, Ice Cream Man has surprisingly little left in the freezer.

Our main young protagonist is Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who avoids the effects of the mysterious ice cream because he’s lactose intolerant. Together with Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), Jared finds himself trapped at school as the infected children hunt down anyone who hasn’t joined their increasingly murderous ranks. At this point, the film begins resembling a mixture of Cooties, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and various children-turning-evil horror movies, while Roth also throws in visual nods to classics including Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Familiarity itself isn’t the problem. Horror has recycled ideas since somebody first decided that splitting up to investigate a strange noise was sensible behaviour. The problem is that Ice Cream Man doesn’t do enough with its premise after establishing it.

The story is incredibly thin. Once the children have eaten the ice cream and begun killing adults, the film essentially becomes a succession of gruesome set-pieces connected by characters running away from them. Even at only around 79 minutes before the credits, the movie begins feeling stretched. What might have worked wonderfully as a vicious 30-minute anthology segment simply doesn’t have enough narrative meat to sustain a feature.

That’s particularly frustrating because there are potentially interesting ideas buried underneath all the blood.

The affected children perceive their actions through strange cartoon imagery, seeing themselves punishing naughty animals rather than brutally murdering human beings. It’s a potentially fascinating way of exploring how the Ice Cream Man manipulates them, but the idea is introduced without ever being developed into anything particularly substantial. The animated sequences have also attracted controversy because generative AI was reportedly used in their creation, something that inevitably became part of the conversation surrounding the film.

Then there’s the Ice Cream Man himself.

Ari Millen certainly looks the part, possessing exactly the slightly unsettling presence the character requires, but he’s strangely underused. Considering his character gives the film its title, you’d expect him to become an increasingly dominant presence as events spiral out of control. Instead, he spends much of the movie functioning as the catalyst rather than its true villain, leaving Millen with surprisingly little opportunity to create a memorable horror character.

Charlie Zeltzer fares better as Jared and makes for an engaging young lead amongst all the madness. Roth himself also appears in the film as the father of two significant characters, although anyone hoping his presence signals some enormous acting showcase should probably lower those expectations considerably.

As the film progresses, an additional character eventually arrives to deliver exposition concerning the Ice Cream Man’s past, providing answers to questions the film hadn’t done enough to make us desperate to solve. His backstory is tied into real-world horror before the narrative heads towards a finale that feels both predictable and oddly underwhelming considering how outrageously everything began.

Ice Cream Man Melts Under Its Own Thin Story

Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is that there is something genuinely disturbing at the centre of this premise. Children murdering their own parents should be horrifying. Parents being placed in situations where they might have to defend themselves against their own murderous offspring could create genuinely uncomfortable moral territory.

Ice Cream Man isn’t interested in exploring much of that.

Instead, the children largely become delivery mechanisms for increasingly disgusting practical effects. That’s fine for a while. We’re certainly not going to complain about an Eli Roth movie containing too much blood, but without suspense, emotional investment or an evolving story beneath it, even spectacular gore eventually loses its impact.

The film clearly wants to evoke the trashy pleasures of the VHS era. Even The Horror Section’s opening logo embraces that aesthetic, and it’s easy to imagine Ice Cream Man sitting on the shelf of an ’80s video shop with lurid artwork promising something your parents definitely wouldn’t approve of. There’s absolutely an audience for deliberately tasteless splatter like this, and some viewers will probably have a great time watching children turn household and classroom objects into instruments of bloody destruction.

It’s also worth clearing up one potentially confusing point: this is not a remake of the 1995 horror film Ice Cream Man starring Clint Howard. Beyond sharing the same title and a tagline, the films aren’t connected. For our money, the older movie is probably the more memorable of the two, even with all its own considerable imperfections.

The reaction to Roth’s film has nevertheless been absolutely brutal, with some corners already treating it as if it belongs amongst the worst movies ever made. We wouldn’t go anywhere near that far.

Ice Cream Man isn’t good. The plot is wafer-thin, the editing can feel sloppy, the performances are uneven, its villain is underused and the relentless gore becomes increasingly repetitive because there isn’t enough story supporting it. But there are entire worlds of cinematic incompetence separating a disappointing Eli Roth splatter movie from infamous disasters such as Birdemic, The Room or Plan 9 from Outer Space. This is still a professionally produced film containing some extremely accomplished practical effects and occasional moments of entertaining lunacy.

More than anything, Ice Cream Man feels like a promisingly nasty idea that never developed into a satisfying feature. There’s a fun short film buried somewhere inside it, and gorehounds may still get their money’s worth from the first half-hour, but everyone else will probably find the novelty melting long before the credits arrive.

For Roth, it’s particularly disappointing coming after the hugely enjoyable Thanksgiving. With The Horror Section launching Ice Cream Man as its first film, we can only hope this is a wobbly beginning rather than an indication of what’s to come from the company.

And as for Roth himself? Maybe getting on with Thanksgiving 2 wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.