Last afternoon at 2:17 PM, every child from Bayleen Bay got up, ran across the park, lined up, walked into the aroma of milky, frozen dairy, and ate some ice cream. Does the parlance of that hook ring any bells? As it turns out, Eli Roth’s latest film Ice Cream Man, ostensibly a remake of the 1995 direct-to-video slasher in which a psychotic ice cream vendor begins experimenting with human flesh in his coned conconctions, is not much of a remake of that movie whatsoever. Instead, it’s closer to a lazy, glaringly apparent riff on Weapons, with a scoop of 2014's Cooties.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L72C7tViKE
This ‘new’ Ice Cream Man follows (you guessed it!) an ice cream vendor (Ari Millen) who is possessing - though it’s never properly explained - the children of the entirely fictional and geographically anomalous Bayleen Bay through his ice cream, and using them to brutally exterminate an entire generation of the town’s residents. Instead of wrapping some hair around a twig and snapping it, he’s serving them ice cream; there’s no ringing of a bell, but the tune of the van binds the youth under a spell. Most terminally, there’s no crazed and witchy Aunt Gladys, replaced by a smiley scoop-server about as vacuous and vanilla as the sun is bright.
Eli Roth returns after his meandering and relatively lifeless videogame adaptation of Borderlands with a film that may not be as disappointing, but it's sizeably more depressing to witness. With his continuously controversial history and rocky reception, it surprises me that Roth got to continue his Hollywood tenure at all, particularly after remarking in 2025 that activist Greta Thunberg “needs to be eaten by cannibals”. It’s a violent, straight-to-the-point comment worn on his sleeve through Splat Pack gorefests like Thanksgiving, Hostel or Cabin Fever, often remarked by critics as senseless and “impatient” slashers known for their gratuitious violence, for those who are all over that sort of thing.
But the Eli Roth who has found himself crafting Ice Cream Man (an idea which he ironically considers "transgressive") appears fed up with the media junket’s decades of critique against his, uh, striking creative choices. He adopts a sort of consequential ‘Who cares? I’m doing it anyway' attitude on this outing, which seemingly spawns multiple sequences using AI-generated VFX (of which he originally declined, before claiming post-hoc that he "misspoke") and a sprawl of scenes in which crazed children violently execute their parents - most of which bordering on becoming senseless torture porn.
On a writing front, his script employs the callous classics such as: an ableist slur thrown around as if it’s lighter than air; a jestful and unsettling handling of a young girl’s implied eating disorder; overt sexualisation of a character who is supposed to be a high-school junior, and a general misunderstanding of how to construct a plot. As eluded to earlier, the mythos of this supernatural ice cream is nebulous: possessed kids can be mindless murdering Hunter-killers in one moment and talkative, cackling doppelgängers verging on Deadites in the next for no apparent reason other than needing to bridge a gap in one’s own shoddy script. The movie also, in the most literal sense, just ends, as we’re proudly transported into an ice cream-y end credits nursery rhyme by Snoop Dogg without any narrative resolution happening, because why not (relatedly, the movie is also executive produced by Nas)?
Credit: The Horror Section and Studiocanal
The script is simply derivative, hardly able to forge itself a new path beyond painting the town’s residents in strawberry with sprinkles, and the occasional flake in the neck. It’s a constant sensory overload of puke and head-crushes that feel weightless as they are not given any patience and deliberation. For a director that has carved out a space in the slasher scene since the 2000s, Roth seems to misunderstand that a kill must have emotional mass - love or hate - for it to stick. A vast, vast majority of victims here are total nobodies, woken up in the night to their head being disassembled, or caved in with a frying pan.
Kills could be at times entertaining if for no reason but the senseless hilarity of children with ice cream residue all over their faces annihilating their school teachers, but the cinematography and score also do such splatter zero favours. Ice Cream Man is composed entirely for the first hour by the classic in-and-out horror stings that are forgotten in less than a second, but the final act decides to mix it up in the strangest of ways. An exposition dump in a church is scored by ghastly harmonics, and an escapade through the school’s playground is soundtracked by some cookie-cutter hip-hop beat for which the .mp4 file must’ve slipped through the cracks, as it truly has no place at all.
In fact, this playground scene is among the worst I've seen in a long time, shot in part with a nauseating and completely desynced first-person shakey-cam approach which was ultimately more grim than watching an entire town be obliterated by sawblades and kitchen utensils. Nothing about this film beyond the occasisional blood fountain looks good, and nobody seems to want to be here either. For every fatality that could be exciting, there's seemingly an AI-generated Steamboat Willie-esque dream scene, or a line that warrants a cringe-ridden convulsion.
It doesn't take long to be all said and done as Roth's latest couldn't even breach the 90-minute 'feature' mark, but Ice Cream Man leaves nothing to be remembered besides the odd explosion of a "boomer" (yes, this is said) and the foreboding shadow it casts upon an entertainment industry under siege from AI slop. Thankfully, if this kind of blinding carelessness had to find a home on our screens, it can be done with a slasher about demonic dairy products that'll be bottom of the barrel in our collective consciousness's bargain bin sooner than it can land a streaming deal, and hopefully before its grimy imprint can pejorate the childlike wonder of seeing the ice cream truck parked outside Stopford.
1/5
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