I can’t lie: I’ve been dragging my feet on this one. By now you’ve probably already heard a great deal about Eli Roth’s THE ICE CREAM MAN if you were at all interested in the project, and most of it is bad. I’m here to tell you that a lot of what you’ve heard isn’t wrong. The AI, the tastelessness of some of the beats in the film, and the anachronistic tone and humor. I’m also here to tell you that if you watched the trailer below and thought you were getting into a thoughtful, considerate commentary of commercialization and the folly of sweets, your rose-colored glasses are doing you a tremendous disservice.
Is Eli Roth’s THE ICE CREAM MAN better than the 1995 Clint Howard-starring vehicle of the same name? No, not by a long shot, but it is exponentially more brutal. That’s what you get when you gamble with Eli Roth; he doesn’t deal in subtlety.
The synopsis: Ice Cream Man follows an idyllic summer town descending into madness when an ice cream man serves kids sweet delights with horrifying results. This really says it all, and to his credit, Roth has made an exceptionally lean film on this premise. The movie opens with a grade school baseball game and all the trappings that go along with it: cliques, friends, bullies, enemies, profanity, and meme culture. We meet our protagonist, Jared Mayfair (Charlie Zeltzer), a lactose-intolerant, clumsy, unathletic victim whose family legacy is one of multigenerational lawyers. As soon as he flubs the game, an eerie Ice Cream Truck appears, piloted by the titular Ice Cream Man (Air Millen), who doles the treats out to the ravenous young patrons of Bayleen.
That very night, all of the children who ate the ice cream rise from their beds and begin murdering every adult they see, starting with their parents. The murders are cruel and unusual, often paired with black-and-white cartoonish dances the children picture in their heads while humming along to “The Ice Cream Song,” an infectious earworm dreamed up by none other than Snoop Dogg. The very next morning, the Mayfair parents drive into “the city” and Jared heads to school, where he is joined by his catatonic classmates and a handful of kids who didn’t eat the ice cream, or puked it up afterward, before it could entrench its demonic curse within them.
Waiting to strike, eventually the kids hear the call of the Ice Cream Truck and spring into action, murdering the teachers and responding emergency personnel and pretty much anyone taller than them. The survivors quickly learn that the kids mean them no physical harm, only a desire to turn them to their cause by shoving ice cream into their faces. They escape to a nearby church where they meet a priest who tells them the story of the Ice Cream Man as well as the twisted path to his undoing.
The Good:
Again, if you’re interested in watching Eli Roth’s THE ICE CREAM MAN it’s likely because you’re a horrorhound who likes his relentless, brutal brand of shocking mutilations, and that’s what you’ll get. The film features many creative kills and horrifying implications. The kids are lethally effective in their mission to eradicate all adults, as per The Ice Cream Man’s machinations. The tone is very unserious; it’s not a horror comedy in the sense that there are jokes thrown in with the horror but in the horror is inherently funny. You’re laughing at people dying, the way they die, and the glee in which the children revel as they dispatch them. There’s even a post-credits scene that offers one final laugh if you’re looking for a punchline after all the gore.
Plot- and character-wise, the film hems pretty closely to horror clichés, taking few chances on the cookie-cutter tropes that have served the genre in the past. There were times I was reminded of better movies that have come before, and once even jokingly referred to the film as WEAPONS 2. There were similarities to the mindless classrooms of GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON’T DIE, as well as a fairly standard A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET origin story for the main villain. I found the ending to be unexpected and refreshing; it defied my expectations and left me breathless. That, I think, is a small victory for Eli Roth amidst the hordes of this film’s detractors. If it’s formulaic gore you seek, you could do much worse than THE ICE CREAM MAN.
The Bad:
Eli Roth, himself, is cast in the film as Marty Wayfair, Jared’s dad, and I had to re-evaluate my position on him as an actor. After seeing him as himself in this year’s documentary DEATH BOOM, I thought he had an affable approachability that would benefit him in a romantic comedy. In this film, he is a punny, insufferable adult figure who seems out of pace with the world around him. His scenes were especially hard to watch, even in a film where children scoop out the brains of their victims and feed them back to them.
There are multiple story threads that I feel weren’t pulled to ideal efficacy, such as the “creepy” shopkeeper from the first act and most of Chris’s (Dylan Hawco) character and storyline. These are minor gripes in a film that mostly serves its purpose.
The Ugly:
There is a scene in the film wherein a first responder, an African-American man, is overpowered by the children and then dragged away when one of them commandeers his truck and pulls him to his ultimate death. I had to shake my head at that point, as the remembrance of the James Byrd, Jr incident is still too fresh to me to find humor in such a scenario. This is one of several cultural missteps in the film, but I understand that horror can be achieved beyond gore and target the fears and preconceptions held deeper within our psyches. Still doesn’t make it easy to watch.
Then, of course, there is the AI. During the flashback scenes of the Ice Cream Man’s origin, the screen takes an Uncanny Valley spin into sepia-toned surrealism, and it is needlessly jarring to the viewing experience. I was immediately put off by the effect, and it took the film quite a while to recover from the unfortunate divergence.
All said, I didn’t hate THE ICE CREAM MAN, and found the experiment to be a fairly by-the-number diversion to hold horror fans over until Damien Leone can give us the final TERRIFIER film. If that’s your jam, then THE ICE CREAM MAN just might satisfy your sweet tooth in the meantime.
THE ICE CREAM MAN premieres in theaters today, August 7th, 2026.
Until next time, take scare of each other.
-McEric, aka Eric McClanahan-
