It’s only August, but I’m pretty sure Eli Roth’s “Ice Cream Man” will be the worst movie I see all year. And for the first time in my critical career, I’m a little unsure where to even begin.
After finishing the movie, I had a long conversation with someone about whether or not it was based on a B movie from the 1980s. It’s not – there is another film of the same name from 1995, but that appears to be completely unrelated. The fact that we both thought it might be, however, should give you a little hint (at least, plot-wise) as to what we’re dealing with here. “Ice Cream Man” (with a script co-written by Roth and Noah Belson), is about a deranged (you guessed it) ice cream man (played by Ari Millen) whose concoctions cause almost all of the children in a small idyllic town to start murdering the adults in increasingly gruesome ways.
The most generous read I can give to “Ice Cream Man” is that it’s Roth’s homage to silly, over-the-top, grossout low budget movies of yore. But, despite its attempts to provoke, there is something altogether too sanitized about “Ice Cream Man” – too unfunny, too blandly cruel, too produced to capture the exploitative thrill of the movies it’s trying to emulate.
I don’t doubt there are a bunch of sickos out there who are interested in this for the gore alone – I too sometimes identify as a bit of a sicko, and I can, in theory, understand the appeal. And I have to give it up for the effects team here. At one point, a little girl methodically takes her teacher’s brains out of his head with an ice cream scooper, and it looked real enough that I felt a little sick.
But – as true sickos know – the appeal of a great slasher flick lies not only in the blood and guts of a great kill, but in the gleeful, nasty spirit of that kill as well. And “Ice Cream Man” has no spirit or soul to speak of. It’s bafflingly constructed and haphazardly pieced together. In one scene, a band of zombified children under the thrall of the evil ice cream man gather outside their school and wait in line for more treats. A child suddenly drops out of the sky without warning – presumably having fallen from the roof – and a teacher we’ve never met before pops up out of nowhere, introduced as though we should already know who she is. She is promptly killed off.
There are numerous moments like this, with no rhyme or reason for the editing or plotting choices. I can only assume that’s on purpose, that the filmmakers are trying to recreate the messy chaos of the early slashers that “Ice Cream Man” wants to emulate – who cares about cinematic construction when little kids are playing jump rope with someone’s intestines? But shoddy filmmaking is a little harder to stand when the thing you’re watching looks less like “Chopping Mall” and more like a pharmaceutical ad.
If “Ice Cream Man” isn’t all that funny or scary, the thing it’s left with is an empty sort of cruelty. Not the kind you find in something like 2022’s “Speak No Evil,” or even in the oeuvre of filmmakers like the Philippou brothers. Those are movies that, like them or not, are made to provoke, to smother us with their nastiness until we can’t take it anymore. “Ice Cream Man” wants to provoke, but the worst feeling it triggers is mild nausea. There’s no grime or grit or anything at all interesting to latch onto – despite the violence, a sheen of conservatism and propriety lingers over the whole thing.
