Directed by Eli Roth
WARNING: This review of Ice Cream Man contains references to sex crimes against children. If that upsets you please do not read this or watch the movie Ice Cream Man.
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT. But does it even matter?
You know we’re in for a rough time when I have to pre-empt my review with a warning like that, but let’s take a step back and introduce today’s topic, the new movie Ice Cream Man. Many years ago, the great Clint Howard starred in a schlocky B-horror movie about an evil Ice Cream Man, which wasn’t great but it was a fun mix of camp and gore and it knew what it was. I liked the original Ice Cream Man, I liked a bunch of Eli Roth’s previous films, so I was ready to give Ice Cream Man a chance. Unfortunately, controversial news broke before Ice Cream Man officially released, news which I will get into shortly, but regardless of any of that, let’s cut to the chase and talk about the only thing that matters: is Ice Cream Man any good?
After lactose intolerant boy Jared is one of the only kids in his town who doesn’t eat mystically poisoned ice cream, he and his band of survivors do everything they can to try and stop the hordes of children on a town-wide murder spree. Things go very, very badly. The story is quite thin so let’s get to that controversial bit I just mentioned. The controversy is from Ice Cream Man’s clear use of generative AI for multiple sequences of the movie. If you support the use of generative AI in art, well, to be diplomatic, that’s an opinion I happen to disagree with. For a lot of people, this is reason enough to skip this movie. For everyone else, the rest of the movie is a good reason to skip it.
As you can probably tell, this is an incredibly thin plot, and, to be fair, that’s not always a bad thing. A lot of great movies like The Fly, Drive, and Green Room all have extremely simple plots elevated by artful filmmaking, great performances, clever visual design, all sorts of things. The problem with Ice Cream Man isn’t that the plot is thin, the problem is that the filmmaking, performances, and visual design are also terrible. I’m not trying to be dramatic or overstate anything here, but there is a chance Ice Cream Man was the worst movie I’ve seen in a movie theater. If I hadn’t already decided to write about it, I would have walked out. I’m surprised more people didn’t walk out of my screening, considering how excessively violent and bleak it was.
Let’s make a few things clear, the first being that I have no problem with extreme violence, I love slasher movies, and really enjoyed the similarly unrated slasher movie In A Violent Nature. I also have no problem with bleak movies. There’s a particular beauty in the bleak nature of movies like The Lodge or Threads, which can nestle into your brain and stick with you forever, giving you an unusual and intense experience that you can’t find easily anywhere else. My problem with Ice Cream Man isn’t that it’s excessively violent or bleak, my problem with it is that it fucking sucks.
I’ll get a bias of my own out in the open: I hate movies with killer children. It’s a pretty rare subgenre, so I’ve never really talked about it before, but there’s something about that particular niche that has never sat right with me. Maybe it’s because the concept has always seemed a little ‘edgy for the sake of edgy’, I dunno, but they’ve never clicked with me. It sure didn’t help that Ice Cream Man has no real plot beyond ‘children kill adults for over an hour’, so there isn’t any buildup or atmosphere, there isn’t really an attempt to be scary, it feels more like an effects reel showing off all the different ways that Eli Roth thought of how kids could kill people. That’s part of why the movie feels incredibly mean spirited.
There is comedy in here but it feels completely at odds with the larger tone of the story. It seems like this is meant to be a horror-comedy where everything is over the top, but it doesn’t understand how not every line can be crossed so easily while keeping a fun atmosphere. It would be one thing if there was something funny about how the adults get killed, but there never really is, it’s just jokes at the expense of the people being murdered without punch lines. Movies like Killer Klowns from Outer Space have people being killed in funny ways, but the camp is dialed way up, the kills are not super graphic, and there are a ton of clever visual gags.
We have to get to the elephant in the room and talk about the aforementioned crimes. The reveal of the movie is that the Ice Cream Man is doing all this because he was falsely convicted of child sexual abuse, because even though it was the town priest who did it, the town’s hotshot lawyer got all the child survivors to name the Ice Cream Man as the perp. So not only are the children survivors of sex crimes, they then had a trusted adult lie to them and manipulate/trick them into testifying against an innocent man, making them 2x victims. It’s pretty upsetting, and wildly juxtaposed against the constant visual gags and jokes that are jammed into the script. Even worse, after these children have grown into adults, they’re targeted again, because now the Ice Cream Man is turning all the children against the adults, killing people who are clearly meant to be the adult versions of the kids who testified. Everyone in your life betrays you, then you’re murdered by a child and Eli Roth makes a joke about it. It’s fucking bleak.
Speaking of bleak, the movie’s ending is unhinged in just how much misery porn it can fit into one sequence. The heroes go off to try and stop the Ice Cream Man, but a trusted adult lies to them and the kids become responsible for the deaths of their parents. Distraught, the children turn their weapons on themselves, ending with a completely pointless story of exploitation and needless suffering. Then the Ice Cream Man leads the other children on, implying that he will do the same to the next town. This whole thing was just depressing and pointless.
It feels like I’m repeating myself, but the levels of pointless misery, overlong kill sequences, and extreme edginess make this an unwatchable movie. This is an exhausting experience, and I don’t even have anything clever to say about it. Ice Cream Man is a mean-spirited and pointless reimagining of a campy horror-comedy classic. I’m really hoping the next movie I watch is good, these past two have been brutal.
