This guest post is written by Josh Bell.
After years of edgelord provocations in movies like the “Hostel” series, “The Green Inferno” and “Knock Knock,” filmmaker Eli Roth found the perfect vehicle for his talents with 2023’s “Thanksgiving,” a suspenseful, well-crafted and often amusing modern-day slasher movie. With relatively low ambitions, Roth delivered on genre expectations while only occasionally asserting the obnoxious, condescending perspective that is his biggest weakness as a filmmaker.
At first, Roth’s new film “Ice Cream Man” seems like it will be following in the footsteps of “Thanksgiving.” It’s also set in an idyllic-looking small town, where residents engage in wholesome, all-American activities. The ice cream truck is nearly as beloved an American institution as Thanksgiving, providing an ideal backdrop for subversive violence. But there’s nothing subversive about “Ice Cream Man,” which lacks even the nasty bite of Roth’s early, divisive work. It’s a thin concept, cheaply stretched to feature length, with amateurish filmmaking that resembles the work of an untrained newcomer rather than an industry veteran.
“Ice Cream Man” opens with the arrival of the mysterious title character (Ari Millen) in the peaceful, inanely named hamlet of Bayleen Bay, where he peddles his wares at a local park following a kids’ baseball game. Roth overdoes the classic small-town signifiers, from the old-timey stores of the main street to the kids frolicking in the park, all slathered in Brandon Roberts’ excessively treacly score. If not for the tween girls taking selfies, “Ice Cream Man” might have fit right into an earlier era, and that’s clearly the sense that Roth wants to evoke.
He also wants to puncture that image early and often, starting at the baseball game, where the kids swear freely and hapless outfielder Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) gets relentlessly bullied by his teammates for his ineptitude on the field. Their nickname for him is “Jarhead,” which isn’t even a particularly apt insult, and it’s representative of the shoddy writing from Roth and longtime collaborator Noah Belson. The supposed shock value of hearing kids swear is a precursor to the movie’s only real trick, the shock value of seeing kids commit acts of horrific violence.
That comes a bit later, once the kids of the town have eaten their ice cream and headed home. Because he’s lactose intolerant, Jared is one of the only young people who doesn’t partake in the ice cream man’s treats, so he’s not triggered by the creepy retro-style black-and-white musical cartoons that infiltrate the cell phones of every other kid. As the ice cream man drives through the sleepy residential streets in the middle of the night, playing his jingle, the kids awaken in homicidal trances, turning on their parents in cartoonishly gruesome ways.
So the ice cream man is a bit like the Pied Piper crossed with Aunt Gladys from Zach Cregger’s “Weapons,” and Roth’s film is built primarily out of references to other, better movies. There’s some gleeful creativity in the methods that the children use to dispatch their parents, with implements ranging from knives and hacksaws to frying pans and mousetraps. Roth deploys some impressive practical effects as the kids continue terrorizing every adult in town, digging out the school principal’s brains with an ice-cream scoop and playing jump-rope with some poor soul’s intestines.
That single gory note is all that “Ice Cream Man” has going for it, though, and Roth and Belson fail to construct an engaging story or compelling characters to fill out the slim 86-minute running time. When Jared wakes up as his normal self the next day and heads to school, he senses that something isn’t right, but it takes the clueless teachers a ridiculously long time to realize that the zombified kids with dried ice cream on their faces aren’t just playing a prank.
As his classmates rise up to slaughter their teachers, Jared runs and hides, eventually finding two other unaffected students: Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly). None of these characters has anything resembling a distinctive personality, and Roth seems lost when dealing with child actors, all of whom give shaky performances. He fared much better with teens in “Thanksgiving,” but Jared’s teenage sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and her douchey ex-boyfriend Chris (Dylan Hawco) are just as awkward and annoying as the kids.
Maybe Roth couldn’t afford to hire recognizable actors on his obviously limited budget — he himself is the most famous face in the movie, giving a smarmy, lazy performance as Jared and Lizzie’s lawyer dad — but it’s failure of his direction that he couldn’t get better work out of the people he ended up casting. The result is a complete lack of emotional investment in anything that happens onscreen, even if it involves horrific acts committed on innocent-looking children.
Horror has a long history of movies about creepy and/or homicidal children, and Roth draws on everything from “Village of the Damned” to “Who Can Kill a Child?,” as well as 2008’s underrated Christmas-set “The Children.” All of those movies more effectively capture just how disturbing it could be for small children to turn malevolent, but “Ice Cream Man” is far too goofy to ever seem scary.
As the villain, Millen mostly fades into the background, occasionally smiling maniacally but never speaking. Roth’s specific homages to “The Birds” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” are sloppy and perfunctory, and his admitted use of generative AI adds to the sense of contempt that radiates from the movie. Overall, the visual style is flat and overlit, and the repetitive action finds the characters running back and forth across the same locations. The dialogue reverts to some of Roth’s worst button-pushing tendencies, with some ableist slurs in place of actual jokes.
“Wait, this is a lot,” Jared complains when the traumatized local priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) delivers an unwieldy hunk of exposition about the ice cream man’s origins and the possible way to defeat him. When even the characters in the movie are objecting to the poor quality of the storytelling, there’s no reason for the audience to stick around, either.
Image Credit: “Ice Cream Man”
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