Ice Cream Man will be released in theaters on August 7.
Eli Roth is no stranger to violence. Over the course of his career, from directing unrelentingly gruesome films like Hostel and the darkly fun yet forgettable recent Thanksgiving to playing a brief yet memorable part in Inglorious Basterds, he’s made blood and viscera the materials with which he paints. Sometimes, this has yielded results you can’t help but be begrudgingly captivated by, where the more the blood runs, the more you can’t bring yourself to look away. Still, in many other cases (looking at you, Cabin Fever and The Green Inferno), it’s felt like Roth was shamelessly lifting ideas from older, far better movies without adding anything new. Rather than feeling like homage, they’re closer to poor imitation. Instead of being remotely horrifying, the scariest thing about a growing number of Roth’s films — when they aren’t outright disasters like the baffling Borderlands — is how derivative they are.
Such is the case with Ice Cream Man, Roth’s first film directed under his company, The Horror Section. Not to be confused with the 1995 horror movie of the same name starring Clint Howard, this is a film about the dangers of consuming too much ice cream that itself feels like it’s gobbled up too many past horror films and puked them out. However, what’s strange this time around is how his latest is not just indebted to horror of the distant past, but recent genre hits like the Terrifier series and Zach Cregger’s Weapons. It’s once more not nearly as good as either of those, lacking the chaotic madness of Art the Clown in its killer and the more haunting yet humorous patience with which Cregger approached his stellar horror film. Instead, it’s just a sporadic smashing together of both of them, bringing together murderous kids trapped in a trance of some kind, and a silent though far less entertainingly expressive killer pulling their strings. The primary difference? The reason for the kids becoming murderous involves eating ice cream.
Credit where credit is due: This is not the worst premise on paper, and even sounds like it could be the start of a more campy, cheeky horror romp. Unfortunately, Roth never makes the most of this potential, resulting in a film that’s really cheap and less than clever. This cheapness extends both to the way it all looks as well as the way it’s constructed. From the opening moments surrounding a baseball game that will soon be the last any in this town ever play, it feels like you’re watching a YouTube sketch rather than an immersive horror film. There isn’t any richness or texture to the images, most of the scenes are bizarrely overlit, and lines of dialogue feel painfully cringeworthy in a way that only seems half intentional. The more that it goes on, the more the whole thing proves inescapably awkward and stiff rather than playfully unhinged. Even when a character later gets their cranium removed so that their brain can be scooped out and fed back to them, it elicits little more than a shrug. It’s a movie that inflicts plenty of head trauma but ultimately reveals itself as having no real brains of its own.
At the core of it all is young Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who — despite being lactose intolerant — will still be tormented by the titular Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) after he unleashes what is essentially a curse on the otherwise peaceful Bayleen Bay. There’s a vaguely Stephen King-esque feel to the town, but we quickly realize how limited in scope it all is. Rather than feel like a real place populated by memorable characters or with interesting environments for the horror to play out in, it’s all rather unimaginative and just about getting to the next burst of violence, which often does prove genuinely gruesome. Parents are murdered in their beds by their children, the school becomes a site of bloody violence, and the town is revealed as having a darker side that the community has (futilely) tried to keep hidden. Some of this is sufficiently preposterous, with kills involving microscopes, a ladder, and even a Segway all bringing plenty of blood to the table.
That’s where the film seems to be attempting to be more like Terrifier, but where that movie — for all its flaws and own budgetary limitations — boasted great performances in lead Lauren LaVera and David Howard Thornton as Art himself, as well as a real sense of go-for-broke mania, there’s nothing here that brings the necessary energy to make this ride come alive. Instead, we get Roth himself playing Jared’s father and delivering lines like, “Dare I say, he gives me the chills,” in reference to the Ice Cream Man, which repeatedly fall flat. Were the film more playful throughout, maybe moments like this could work; instead, this line lands awkwardly and is followed by one of the most truly strange dubbed lines you’ll ever hear when Roth’s character turns away. It’s all more amateurish than it is darkly absurd, giving you a “we have Terrifier at home” feeling.
The Ice Cream Man is no Art the Clown or Aunt Gladys, and Roth is no horror auteur.
Most disappointingly, when it comes to what this horror film attempts to serve up, there just isn’t that much to chew on. It’s never quite creatively ridiculous enough to go off the rails, and the scenes where we’re spoon-fed mounds of rather unnecessary exposition grind everything to a halt. Where the grim pleasures to be found in Weapons were balanced by a creeping sense of dread, Roth’s Ice Cream Man doesn’t earn either. It occasionally gestures towards playing around with some animated sequences, only for those to fall by the wayside. For all it throws at the wall to see what sticks, the surface stays pretty bare. Despite running less than 90 minutes, you will feel the length; a sudden swerve to dive into the backstory of its killer just results in a dreary drawn-out explanation.
In the end, despite how desperately it attempts to replicate what’s been done better elsewhere, the Ice Cream Man is no Art the Clown or Aunt Gladys, and Roth is no horror auteur. Where Weapons was restrained before ending with a bang, providing a dark cherry on top with one of the most satisfying yet sinister endings of recent memory, this film fails to build in any entertaining way and just leaves you with a sense of emptiness. The only real revelation that you come away with is that you could probably entirely skip this meal, including the dessert that is supposedly so important, and not miss much. You won’t be screaming in either joy or fear, but you will open your mouth to yawn.
