SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY 'CONES'
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
ICE CREAM MAN (18)
Director: Eli Roth
Screenplay: Noah Belson, Eli Roth
Starring: Charlie Zeltzer, Eli Roth, Ari Millen
Running time: 86 minutes
Cinema
Review: David Stephens
Never trust a child in a horror film. At worst, they will be the spawn of Satan; at best, they will be extremely susceptible to malignant influences. They won’t hesitate to chow down on their loving parents during any zombie apocalypse, and there are plenty of other reasons for them to display psychopathy beyond their tender years. They might succumb to a child-only virus and go feral (Cooties – 2014), be turned into ghoulish scavengers by radioactivity (The Children – 1980), be driven to acts of violence by humankind’s destructive nature (Who Could Kill a Child? – 1976), are negatively influenced by a cosmic event (Bloody Birthday – 1981), or just be born evil due to cruel genetics (any version of The Bad Seed). But kids turning killer after an ice-cream? That’s a new one on us. Welcome to Eli Roth’s pet project, Ice Cream Man. After his experience on Lionsgate’s Borderlands, which bombed and was ripped to shreds by critics, he established the film company The Horror Section to totally bypass the restrictive demands of certain studio systems, being partly inspired by the success of the unrated Terroriser movies. The plot is based on an idea that he’s long desired to bring to the screen and is in no way based on the offbeat 1996 horror film of the same name (although it’s just as daft). Now released on screens in the US and UK, just in time for yet another heatwave, is it cool or just a pile of melted ooze?
The story takes place in the picturesque small US town of Bayleen Bay. The opening act introduces us to the usual stock characters and mainly focuses on Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), a typical kid in a typical town. He gets bullied a bit, misses a catch at the local baseball game, and often drops f-bombs. But he’s a good kid who gets on well with his parents (Karen Cliché and a cameo by Roth) and puts up with some good-natured ribbing from his older teen sister (Sarah Abbott as Lizzie). However, Jared has noticed a creepy Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) visiting the park and streets and plying all the youngsters with the sweet treats from his white van. Accompanied by earworm music and over-enthusiastic devouring of said delicacies, it seems to have sparked a change in the neighbourhood overnight. Sure enough, when the sun rises, a large proportion of the adults in Bayleen Bay have been gruesomely done in by their now-psychotic offspring. This is just the first stage of the Ice Cream Man’s plan, though, as the zombified nippers still go to school, intent on turning the unaffected children into more of their kind and finishing off the remaining adults. Lactose-intolerant Jared finds himself in the unenviable position of trying to defeat this unlikely modern pied-piper, with only his sister and two desert-dodging friends to help him.
Most filmmakers have a love/hate relationship with elements of the film community, and Roth is definitely knee-deep in the hate pool at the moment. After a mostly positive reaction to Thanksgiving several years ago, Borderlands was bombed into oblivion on a critical and box-office basis. And now this. Mainstream critics are giving this a major smackdown, with some calling it “worst of the year”. That needn’t matter if it appealed to genre fans and general cinemagoers, but an extra downsize has been delivered by the flavour-of-the-month criticism that it utilised generative AI in its making. To be fair, this was (allegedly) only in a couple of brief animated sequences, in the style of ‘Rubber Hose’ animation from the 1930s, which doesn’t even take up the full screen. Nevertheless, all of that, and criticism of the style, tone, and content, means that Ice Cream Man is never going to trouble Spider-Man for popularity in any multiverse. And whilst we’d love to poke the mainstream critics in the eye and flip a finger to their reactions, in this case they’re really not far off the mark.
Because, in all honesty, ICM is a muddled disappointment. There are kernels of a good idea and some themes that could have been elaborated upon to produce a better film, whether it was on a blood-curdling or comedy-horror level. How would a parent react to defending themselves against their own child if they have murderous intent? What would a cop do to tackle a mob of weapon-wielding toddlers? Nope. None of that here. It says a lot that the final ten minutes of Weapons (which a LOT of people have unfavourably compared this to) is far funnier and much more disturbing than the whole of ICM. Instead, we get firemen pushed off ladders, parents beheaded in their beds with a hacksaw, teachers pierced in the eye with microscopes, and head-squishing. So much head-squishing! It’s like the openings of The Happening or Maximum Overdrive, but much gorier, sort of played-for-laughs, and with the click-bait addition of young children performing the murders. You’d think this might be entertaining, in a bad-taste sort of way, but it’s presented as a series of vignettes meant to showcase practical effects rather than outrageous moments that advance the plot. Just take the ‘brain scoop’ sequence, which goes on far too long and looks silly rather than shocking or disturbing.
This kind of sets the tone for the whole film. It sort of feels like The Goonies or a similar family-orientated film, but with the dial set to ‘gore-tastic’ and ‘potty-mouthed’ rather than an actual PG film. There are dad jokes and corny one-liners, most of which are met with disapproving silence or derision from the rest of the cast, let alone the cinema audience! It has the atmosphere of a kitsch romp rather than anything approaching horror. This is underlined by the titular villain, a mute individual who looks like a cross between filmmaker John Waters and Charlie Chaplin and has the mime-like mannerisms of Art the Clown (not a coincidence, we think). The thing is that the first 15 minutes are actually pretty good in setting up the location and teasing the menace. Kids and adults interact realistically, and Millen’s villain (heh) seems like an interesting men-ice… err… menace. But that picket fences satire and part Stranger Things vibe gets severely compromised as events ensue over the next night and day.
Look, we know we’re talking about supernatural threats and mind-controlling choc-ices, but a lot of things about the plot are just messy and lazy, making it hard to invest in the film, apart from giggling at the gore. For a start, how does that damn ice-cream work for chrissakes! It’s never satisfactorily explained. The kids just eat it, get sprinkles and food dye around their mouths, and are silently compelled by ICM to perform acts of savagery. But they seem to have partial control of their actions, and if they puke up a mouthful of the stuff, they are magically cured. Oh, and it only paralyses teenagers. We never see its effect on adults. WTF? In addition to that, ICM’s origin is pure Freddy Krueger and marks a shift in the sheer lunacy of the backstory. Revenge-driven entities are one thing, but why the Hell is a frigging ‘Necromancer’ thrown into the mix, mentioned nonchalantly like it’s a real 9-5 job? It’s already a tonal mess, but that just drags it down into farce and something you would expect from a Troma production. Just weird. And don’t even get us started on the ending, which (probably like the after-effects of filming for the young actors in the cast) leaves a real nasty taste in the mouth and seems pointless beyond a shock-tactic which emulates better films.
So, there’s a lot to take in and deride there, making it understandable why mainstream critics have metaphorically throttled it. But it’s not quite as bad as some make out. Late-night crowds in search of something nasty to tide them over until Terroriser 4 will likely get a minor kick out of it. It is (paradoxically) nice to see so much practical FX being used to depict all the body damage, which ranges from tennis balls in the nuts to cats-cradles being made out of viscera. It’s a pity the outrage around the AI cartoons has smoke-bombed all that. Some of the childish slants on the attacks (teacher’s corpses being painted into a playground mural, mousetraps on feet, etc) are vaguely imaginative. As Roth is prone to do, there are some very obvious nods to classic horror. The kids are introduced with a Friday the 13th-type chant, but it’s ‘La-La-La’ rather than ‘Ki-Ki-Ma’ and they scream in a very Body Snatchers-type way. One of the most obvious forms of homage is the film’s salute to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, where a would-be victim sits in front of a climbing frame, oblivious to the fact that doom is gathering behind them. Only this time it’s pasty-faced children rather than ominous crows. So that’s nice for genre fans…
Otherwise, after the enjoyable slasher excesses of 2023’s Thanksgiving, this is a slushy disappointment that really doesn’t know what it wants to do, aside from slinging barrels of blood at the screen and trying to offend those of a gentle disposition. To be fair, the leads (especially Zeltzer and Abbott) are actually pretty good in their roles but are ultimately let down by the storytelling and material. As such, it’s hard to recommend it and (judging by early box-office takings) most people are going to give it a miss at the cinema. The potential was there, and perhaps if a different direction had been taken, it could have generated (in a non-AI way) a lot more interest. It’s difficult to guess what connotations this might have for future Horror Section projects, but it’s likely to at least result in some reflection. Whatever happened to Thanksgiving 2 anyway? Delayed due to scheduling issues according to trade press. Ah well, at least August 2026 has other goodies to offer cinema horror fans whilst this one melts into the pavement.
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