'Ice Cream Man' review: Eli Roth's latest splatterfest comes up cold

Courtesy of The Horror Section

---

It wasn’t lost on me, sitting through Eli Roth’s “Ice Cream Man,” just how desperately it wants to bottle the same kind of lightning that made last summer’s horror sensation “Weapons” such a phenomenon. Both films hinge on the terrifying notion of children being manipulated into carrying out unspeakable acts by a sinister puppet master with a gruesome agenda. The difference is that “Weapons” understood the value of mystery and mounting dread. “Ice Cream Man” settles for carnage.

To be fair, Roth delivers exactly what longtime fans expect. His latest slasher checks every familiar box: unrated levels of gore, disembowelments, severed limbs, and an almost cartoonish commitment to finding new ways to make audiences squirm. In many ways, it’s a return to his low-budget roots after the comparatively polished, $15 million “Thanksgiving,” which proved he could still craft an unapologetically fun crowd-pleaser. Here, however, Roth strips things back so aggressively that all that’s left is about 83 minutes of relentless bloodshed propping up the barest outline of a story.

The setup follows the origins of a mythical boogeyman whose delicious frozen treats transform the children of Bayleen Bay into sugar-fueled psychopaths. Once they’ve had a bite, anything within arm’s reach becomes a murder weapon. Baseball bats, hacksaws, textbooks, microscopes, ladders. It doesn’t matter. The result is a town overrun by pint-sized killers gleefully slaughtering unsuspecting adults in increasingly grotesque fashion.

It’s also impossible not to view “Ice Cream Man” as Roth’s attempt to launch his own “Terrifier”-style franchise. No, this isn’t a remake of the 1995 Clint Howard cult oddity. Instead, it’s a genre mash-up that desperately wants its own horror icon but never actually creates one. The Ice Cream Man, played by Ari Millen, lacks the unforgettable presence of Art the Clown or even the gleefully campy menace of Aunt Gladys. His entire method of spreading evil amounts to getting children to eat ice cream before recruiting them into his growing army, making the whole affair feel like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” filtered through a slasher movie.

If all you’re looking for is wall-to-wall gore, practical effects, and the occasional laughably unconvincing digital composite, “Ice Cream Man” absolutely delivers. But that’s about where its ambitions end.

What’s frustrating is that the premise itself isn’t inherently bad. On paper, it has all the ingredients of a delightfully cheesy B-movie, something not far removed from the scrappy energy that made “Cabin Fever” such a refreshing shot in the arm for horror. That film felt grimy, inventive, and just strange enough to announce Roth as an exciting new voice, a promise he doubled down on with the equally memorable “Hostel.” None of that personality survives here. “Ice Cream Man” feels cheap in ways that have nothing to do with its budget and everything to do with its imagination. It never immerses you in its world, nor does it establish any believable camaraderie among the quartet of kids trying to stop the titular killer. At times, it resembles the bloodiest episode of “Goosebumps” ever made, only without the charm or sense of adventure.

The dialogue is painfully undercooked, and the longer the movie lumbers along, the more confusing and repetitive it becomes. It’s almost impressive that an 84-minute movie can feel this padded. Worse, the violence begins to lose its impact astonishingly fast. By the time someone has their scalp peeled back, their brain scooped out, and fed back to them, the shock value has completely evaporated. Roth becomes so fixated on escalating blunt-force trauma that he forgets the thing that makes great horror memorable: giving you a reason to care who’s on the receiving end of it. Without that emotional investment, the bloodshed becomes little more than background noise.

At the center of the story is Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who conveniently can’t eat the cursed ice cream because he’s lactose intolerant. Naturally, that makes him the town’s reluctant hero as he repeatedly crosses paths with the Ice Cream Man, whose decades-old curse seeks revenge against Bayleen Bay for sins committed long ago. Anyone familiar with “A Nightmare on Elm Street” will immediately recognize where Roth is drawing inspiration, and not in a flattering way. Even the film’s last-second “gotcha” reveal lands with more exhausted groans than genuine surprise, a moment clearly intended as a mic-drop that instead hits the floor with a dull thud.

The town itself never becomes a character. Bayleen Bay exists solely as another backdrop for inventive massacres. Parents are butchered in their beds. School hallways become slaughterhouses where teachers are beaten to death with microscopes and ladders. Every sequence exists only to bridge the gap to the next kill. There’s almost no connective tissue tying these scenes together, no mythology worth digging into, and no atmosphere beyond the promise of another geyser of blood.

Above all else, “Ice Cream Man” leaves you feeling strangely empty. By the time the umpteenth victim is torn apart, you’re completely numb to it. There’s no mounting suspense, no lingering sense of dread, and no real payoff when the children finally discover how to stop the Ice Cream Man. The climax feels less like the natural conclusion of a story than an obligation the screenplay has to fulfill before the credits roll, complete with an overlong exposition dump that probably could have been cut altogether. The longer Roth explained the Ice Cream Man’s mythology, the less I actually wanted to know.

I’m glad Roth has found a new sandbox with The Horror Section, and I genuinely hope it gives him the creative freedom to make riskier, stranger films again. But if “Ice Cream Man” is any indication, he’ll need to rediscover the imagination that once made his work feel dangerous rather than simply disgusting. There’s no nourishment here. Plenty of guts, goo, and gore, but not a whole lotta brains.

Grade: D

ICE CREAM MAN opens in theaters Friday, August 7th.