It’s almost the summer holidays in Bayleen Bay and the kids can’t wait. Some are playing out in the street while others are partaking in a school baseball game. Afterwards, the Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) appears in his blue-and-white truck, looking straight out of the 1950s, with his fun jingle and delicious creamy treats. Everyone grabs an ice cream, bar those who are lactose intolerant like our protagonist Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), a small, skinny kid who has his wits about him. He’s unsettled by the strange names of the ice creams advertised on the van, such as “Creepy Crawly” and “Serpent Swirl.” Jared is bullied by a few particularly mean kids, but he isn’t afraid to stand up for himself. He has a best friend, Elliot (Luke Dietz), whose actual friendship we see nothing of before all the kids go crazy and start killing their parents and any other adult who gets in their way.
Under the spell of the Ice Cream Man, his jingle, and the tasty treats which sustain them, the kids assemble the next day for school with the structured, simultaneous movement of the kids from Weapons—they have vacant stares and some are covered in blood, but they all have different flavours of ice cream dried around their mouths. They are unresponsive when questioned by their peers and concerned teachers, responding only to the call of the ice cream van’s theme and a cartoon that plays on their phones which keeps them entranced. The cartoons are revealed to be violent and the kids re-enact them in a more gruesome fashion as they saw off their mother’s head, bash their father’s skull in with a baseball bat, and scoop out their teacher’s brains like ice cream. All of the adults are confused, but they’re no match for this army of ice-cream-filled violent kids—which Jared is trying to hide from, alongside peers Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly), as the kids try to force ice cream down their throats.
At first, I thought Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man was a remake of the 1995 film of the same name, but it turns out they’re unrelated. Roth’s film is visually bright and vibrant and captures the feel of a 1980s coming-of-age comedy drama mixed with the dark themes and heavy gore of Roth’s previous horror films. Ice Cream Man juxtaposes the bright joy of summer alongside the dark and violent gore created by the kids really well. The effects are a combination of practical and digital, and are seriously gory, gruesome, and vicious. There’s one scene where the kids covers their dead teachers in chalk and googly eyes, turning them into a pretty picture and covering up the horror, as though they are not privy to the horrific reality they are enforcing.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a film (that isn’t a children’s film) where kids are the protagonists. The main kids themselves are great actors, including Jared’s teenage sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and her ex Chris (Dylan Hawco), who both feel like they’d excel in a film like Zombieland or Spontaneous. Generally, the dialogue feels casual and realistic, particularly in some early scenes between Jared, Lizzie, and their lawyer parents (Roth and Karen Cliche). There are certainly a few clunkers, however, like when Mia says: “I’m a 12 year old girl, of course I know how to make myself vomit.” It’s dark commentary that feels very Roth, but it’s somewhat misplaced and undercooked, just like the rest of the film’s commentary, which should’ve been stronger. There are, surprisingly, some fun and silly moments that made me laugh out loud.
Roth has come under fresh controversy after revealing that “AI was used in a small portion of a few scenes in the film” to Variety. “It was an opportunity where technology and creativity came together to help bring my vision for the film to life.” This came after Roth had explained to Polygon that he had drawn the cartoons himself: “I have an animation background and I drew it. I worked with an animation team and I wanted it to look and feel like […] an old Mickey Mouse cartoon where he goes to a haunted house and there’s brooms and dancing skeletons and this kind of flowing dancing stuff and the jittery style of the animation. So I drew the loop cycles and the styles. Then I had some animators help kind of make it a little more fluid, and I worked with an artist to give it a bit of an old-timey jittery feel. But I sat there and I drew out the frames that I wanted, and I tried to match the style of the 1920s haunted Mickey Mouse cartoons.” While it’s unclear what exactly AI was used for, it’s thought to have been used for these cartoons (which I think look good and achieve Roth’s vision) and during a flashback involving the Ice Cream Man. I also wondered whether it was used to enhance the ice cream around the kids’ mouths, but who knows. It’s baffling that Roth would resort to teaming up with AI visual effects company Dark Half when he has previously helmed films that have created memorable and genre-defining imagery around gore, even if the films themselves haven’t always been that good.
Ice Cream Man’s major weaknesses come from its lack of plot and the fact that the Ice Cream Man himself, a mute pied piper of sorts, has little presence. There’s the occasional shot which makes him feel like the ominous threat he is, but many others where his creepy, silent smile falls flat. In one scene, a Priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) provides backstory in a heavy exposition dump that explains the Ice Cream Man was accused of a crime he didn’t commit and now wants revenge. It feels lazy and rushed—another incident where what should’ve been dark, biting commentary doesn’t actually land. The script in its current iteration would’ve better suited a short film. There’s a good twist that I wasn’t able to predict, not until right before it was revealed, and then the film ends abruptly, leaving you sat in the horror it’s created. The ending has me torn. Ice Cream Man is a strange experience. There’s a lot of good, it just doesn’t outweigh the bad.
Ice Cream Man is out in cinemas now.
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