The Movie: Ice Cream Man
The Director: Eli Roth
The Cast: Ari Millen, Benjamin Byron Davis, Eli Roth, Karen Cliche, Dylan Hawco, Sarah Abbott, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Charlie Zeltzer, Charlie Storey
The Story: An idyllic summer town descends into madness when an ice cream man serves kids sweet delights with horrifying results.
The Rating: 6 / 10
The Review:
Way back in 2002, Eli Roth directed a feature horror film called Cabin Fever that saw the beginning of a career within the genre that has focused on pushing the boundaries of how much gore and blood and WTF style mayhem. Movies like Hostel and The Green Inferno were perfectly tailored for late night film festival screenings and, while results may vary, his movies are always talked about. Now we have Ice Cream Man which is a gore filled hackathon type of movie that somehow also feels like one of those afternoon specials we watched after coming home from school between episodes of He-Man and Duck Tales.
The story is easy to follow. Crazed ice cream man feeds frozen treats to kids who then become murder obsessed minions determined to take down a whole town's worth of adults. There is a reason why and Roth attempts a couple plot twists that feel more obvious and inevitable than shocking or mind blowing. This is about as big of an example of basic story telling as you will find which really doesn't matter because all we're really interested in seeing is how bloody the whole thing is going to get before its over.
If you want me to pick apart all the things that are wrong with this movie, we could be here for a while but most of it are things that you would expect like bad acting and storytelling beats that make no sense. What we do get is some good humor (see what I did there) and plenty of intestines being pulled in every direction and sometimes that's enough. This movie is a prime example of having proper expectations when you sit down to watch.
One thing I will point out is that Eli Roth raised funds for this movie and financed it himself rather than going through a studio. He chose to make the movie he wanted to make rather than allowing studio heads to "suggest" changes in an effort to make the film more marketable. The movie is also being released without a rating, mostly for the same reason. I guess when your movie is filled with demonically possessed kids murdering people in gruesome ways, you need to get creative.
Thank you for reading this review. If you're a fan of these types of movies, I would definitely encourage you to check it out. For all its flaws, I still enjoyed it and had a good time watching all the bloody mayhem unfold. It's also a great way to support independent cinema as filmmakers try to keep pathways open for all types of movies to have a place on theater screens.
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