An evil ice cream man (Ari Millen) turns a town’s children into adult-killing monsters in this slasher flick they should have called Children of the Cornetto.
In a cynical attempt to cash in on the violent kiddy horror of Weapons and Terrifier 2, Eli Roth serves up this insultingly cheap and horribly rushed confection about children getting demented scooper-powers after eating demonic ice cream – all except Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) as he is lactose intolerant, Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) who has thrown up her ice cream (because nothing says fun like using childhood bulimia as a plot device), and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) due to reasons never explained but possibly because he is black.
Before you can say ice cream headache, the kids start mutilating their parents and teachers in sickly ways. This could be interesting if Roth could be bothered to provide any build-up, tension or insight into the town and its dynamics, but the only character with even a wafer-thin backstory is Jared who is basically a happy kid with a nice family (Roth also plays his dad). Eat your heart out, Stephen King.
The director has at least put some thought into the sugar-fuelled carnage, particularly a playground sequence that makes every piece of equipment an instrument of torture. But apart from shamelessly ripping off the Clown Cafe sequence from Terrifier 2, any hope of enjoyment is melted by ugly cinematography and production values so synthetic that it never resembles a real film.
In fact Roth got himself into a sticky situation by claiming to have drawn the movie’s animated sequences, before admitting the use of AI – although if anything screams AI it is the script, which includes an incoherent riff about Mitt Romney (“Do we have any Mint Romney ice cream?”), and a nonsensical moment where someone gets Siri to phone “mom and dad” in a single call. And when Jared tells his friends he is unaffected because of his lactose intolerance, one of them calls it “more information than we needed,” even though it was exactly the information that they needed. We’re used to horror screenplays sounding like a first draft, but they usually show some signs of human involvement.
But the cherry on top of this Magnum opus of awful is its ice-cold lack of humour. Even bad-taste yucks require a sense of humour that Roth does not appear to possess, and gross-out comedy without the comedy is simply torture porn – and torture kiddy porn in this case. Where the Terrifier movies had an invitingly fun side to their unhinged violence, Ice Cream Man‘s mean-spiritedness leaves a nasty taste that makes you wonder who is meant to be enjoying it. Considering it was produced by a company set up by the director around 16 months before the film’s release, it seems the only person Roth is serving is himself.
