The best thing about Ice Cream Man is how easy it is to hate, and how easy it is to allow that hate to fuel a rant against how much it does so utterly and disappointingly wrong. It helps that Eli Roth (who really looks like the poster boy to be used when women are warned against leaving their drinks unguarded anywhere men are also present) has been making it easier to forget what some may view as his past glories. And this is coming from someone who had a blast with Thanksgiving when that was released, just a few years ago.
If you look online to check other summaries of Ice Cream Man, you will see it described as a horror comedy, a black comedy slasher, or just a fun and gory romp surely designed around the motto "sundae, bloody sundae". It isn't any of those things. It's not funny, it has no thrills or chills, there are no interesting characters or plot developments, and the gore is so pathetic in showing how obviously Roth wants to tap in to the Terrifier income stream that it will make many simply roll their eyes. It's also worth noting that few of the special effects are any good, which is a great shame.
An ice cream man (Ari Millen) rolls into town. Most of the kids eat ice cream. Kids become murderous maniacs. That's all there is to this movie. Yes, a handful of young characters avoid the fate of so many others, leaving them charged with battling others and saving the town, and there's a tiresome, and very thin, backstory for the titular character, but that's it.
Roth, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Noah Belson, shows that he's no longer interested in being creative, if he ever really was. He's interested in being a brand, and in crossing over with other brands. That's the only explanation for this absolute trash, and horror movie fans deserve so much better than this.
Apparently intent on making every wrong decision at every possible moment, Roth fills the screen with poor jokes, poor computer effects that make you unable to appreciate the few decent practical moments, and some unnecessary generative AI that I can only hope comes back to bite him on the ass when someone feeds his own filmography into some program and asks it to spit out a gory horror movie titled something like "Hostel Fever".
I don't want to take the time here to call out any of the cast members. Aside from Millen and Benjamin Byron Davis (someone who delivers the background exposition on the main character), nobody is doing very good work. They're not terrible either, but they don't do well enough to avoid being overshadowed by everything else that's wrong in almost every scene.
Those who want to pretend that this is just a harmless bit of nonsense that should amuse horror fans will probably view me as some uptight wuss. But I would ask those same people, if they are fans of Roth, to revisit his earlier work and then try to argue the point that we've not watched the journey of someone who has gone from being an exciting and passionate horror fanboy to a cynical and money-grubbing hack, with far too little talent, and probably far too big a cyber-wallet stuffed with various crypto-currencies.
2/10
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