By John Corrado
Eli Roth’s latest bad-taste splatter flick Ice Cream Man is a passion project that the horror filmmaker has been trying to get made for years, and finally had to self-produce under the banner of his new production company The Horror Section.
The result is an idiotic horror comedy (?) that is never particularly scary but always very gross, with Roth relishing in the squidgy gore of his usual decapitations, dismemberments and disembowelments. But this time they are all performed by a cast of middle school children, often in closeup.
The film is set in the town of Baylean Bay, the type of place where little league baseball games are played in the evenings and all the children excitedly line up for ice cream afterwards. But the good people of Baylean Bay end up having their seemingly idyllic small town summer lives upended by a creepy ice cream truck driver (Ari Millen), who rolls into town serving frozen desserts turn the local kids into rampaging zombies.
We follow a group of hero kids led by Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who is lactose intolerant so therefore immune to the curse because he can’t eat ice cream. They must stop the mute menace that is the Ice Cream Man, and rescue the town’s possessed kids from their dairy stupors. The film is being released unrated to get away with showing the extreme gore and bodily harm, yet seems geared towards an audience of disturbed teens looking for something edgy to watch.
Yes, Ice Cream Man is a film that turns children into cannibalistic monsters, not to scare us as much as to provide the basis for a movie that basically only exists to be in the absolute poorest taste. This is straight edgelord stuff, meant to evoke a reaction from being as absurdly grotesque as possible, with scene after scene of these deranged zombie kids mutilating and killing their parents and teachers in the most disgusting ways that Roth can think of.
It’s like Roth has made a deranged tribute to 1980s and ’90s kids movies with a lot more blood, gore and entrails; this is his transgressive take on The Sandlot, one might say, with a few homages to Home Alone. But, if Ice Cream Man is occasionally (very occasionally) so over-the-top in its garish charade of depravity that it does evoke a sick laugh or two, the film also feels mostly tedious to watch.
Even by torture porn standards, Ice Cream Man is just really, really stupid, almost proudly so. It’s just not good. It’s not well-written or well-made. The film carries a cheap-looking direct-to-video aesthetic, including obvious uses of generative AI. The sole saving grace, one could argue, is that Roth is trying to be tongue-in-cheek, and the film is laced with black humour that suggests it isn’t trying to take itself even remotely seriously. But that doesn’t make it good.
In short, Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man is not a good movie. Like, at all. But how entertaining you find it to be will all depend on how strong your stomach is and how high your tolerance is for something that pushes far past any boundaries of good taste. The only good thing about Ice Cream Man is that it is mercifully shot at only 86 minutes. And that it was filmed in the GTHA, so was able to support our local economy and production crews. I guess that’s a bright side if it must exist at all.
The Joy of Movies 