After many failed attempts at horror throughout the years and, most recently, failed comedy in Borderlands, somehow Eli Roth has been allowed back in the director’s chair once again, now with a horror comedy. However, two wrongs don’t always make a right and Ice Cream Man is just as terrible, if not somehow worse, than any of Roth’s earlier additions into his catalogue.
Do not watch Ice Cream Man. I feel that’s all I really need to say, because that’s all there is to it. This movie fails at every turn, whether that’s in its creepy horror of a twisted ice cream man, or its comedy attempts which don’t even manage to crack a smile. There are no redeeming qualities in this and it digs its own grave even lower than I thought it could, completely unnecessarily. Eli Roth seems to have a talent for this, though.
I’ll start with the writing, the most mundane of what this does an injustice. First, we aren’t given any kind of glimpse into any of the ice cream man’s motivations until the last ten minutes, at which point I would have preferred they just don’t explain it.
I have no problem with a villain that’s evil just for the sake of being evil. Some of the greatest villains of all time have no motivations; I love a character like the Joker, for example. However, the difference between a character like that and the ice cream man is that they’re actually well-written. Even though you have no idea why they do what they do, you’re still able to detest them and root for their downfall because they do things that give the characters reason in some sense. Nothing about the ice cream man makes me want to see him be defeated aside from the mere fact that we’re told we should.
If we weren’t subjected to the long, tiresome, seemingly never-ending scene of this priest explaining who the ice cream man is and why he’s terrorising the town, I would have actually enjoyed watching him slightly more; at least he’s something of an agent of chaos. He could have been a much worse written version of the Joker, one that hands out possessed ice cream to children just for the thrill of seeing a child betray the love they have for their parents and be the reason for their death. Some people just want to watch the world burn.
But we didn’t see that. It had to be a nice man who was turned evil by a necromancer and looking for revenge on those who put him in prison. That just makes this character so much more boring. I don’t care about the fact that the whole town conspired against him twenty-something years ago because why should I? We’re not given any reason aside from the simple fact that he is the antagonist of the story. Yes, what’s happening is bad but I just don’t care for it.
The dialogue in this is terrible and the children’s acting makes it much worse. For a movie like this, in which the main cast is composed of only preteens, a main priority should be actually hiring good child actors. However, not a single kid in this seems to know how to act in any way. I don’t fully fault the children too much here, though, it’s not like they were given much to work with and the adult actors seem just as bad — so maybe it’s all down to the script.
In the aforementioned long, expositional scene, explaining the ice cream man’s motivations, they repeat lines over and over again — framing it as the children confirming what this priest has said — which play out, to me, as Eli Roth not trusting the audience to pay attention during a monologue or thinking we’re too stupid to understand what’s happening if it isn’t being drilled into our heads multiple times. I’d be slightly more okay with this if the movie was aimed at the youngest possible audience, but this is an 18 rated movie — every single person in that cinema should be adults.
Hardly anything actually happens in this movie. We simply meander around, following a group of children running from another group of children, then it ends. I assume most of this is just to fill space because Eli Roth realised he wrote a ten page script, because everything just seems like it’s wasting our time. The core concept of this, essentially whatever happens in the first and last 5–10 minutes, could have worked as a short film. Cut all the fat and this isn’t quite so bad. But this has absolutely no place being feature length, even if it is under 90 minutes. Somehow, they manage to make this feel longer than The Odyssey, a movie which is just over double the length.
Now that I’ve gone over a few of the more mundane sins of this movie — believe me, there are so many more, most just aren’t worth mentioning — I’ll move onto some of the more egregious and, at many times, just completely unnecessary wrongdoings. First, they essentially, in a roundabout way, call autistic people the r slur. There’s a scene in which the main character’s sister says “maybe you aren’t as [r slur] as I said” to her ex-boyfriend after he comes up with a good idea. Her little brother then mentions her also calling him autistic. I’m sure you can also draw the conclusions yourself.
Not only does this use a word that hasn’t been acceptable for many years, as well as using it against a very well recognised disability, this makes a joke about a girl having an eating disorder. We learn, at some point, that to stop yourself from being possessed by eating this ice cream, you must make yourself throw up. After the girl of the main group does this with ease and everybody else is astounded, she says “I’m a 12 year old girl, of course I know how to make myself throw up”. Both of these moments simply just leave a bad taste in my mouth and worsen my perception of the rest of this, as well as making me simply dislike the creators. Both of these lines were also very throwaway, making them completely unnecessary — not that there would ever be a necessary use for jokes like this.
The biggest issue with this movie, and what makes me detest it so much more, allowing it absolutely no grace, is its completely shameless use of generative AI. This is used in three aspects of the film, first as the menu for the ice cream truck, second in some sort of dream sequence, and finally as some video that these children are entranced in for about three seconds.
The second and third uses of AI are completely unnecessary. Even if these moments weren’t AI generated, they would still serve no purpose. The video doesn’t matter in any way and never even shows up past a single scene, and these dream sequences just portray these children’s minds in a way that we don’t need to see. I understand that these children, who have just sawed their own parents’ heads off and are now jumping on their bed, are under the ice cream man’s trance — I don’t need to see a little thought bubble showing an ice cream also jumping with them.
The menu being completely AI generated is where I have the biggest problem, however. This is mostly because at times it feels as if they’re flaunting the fact that they didn’t hire real people to create the graphics for this. We see the camera pan up and down multiple times for absolutely no reason, shamelessly showing off the absolute slop on display. At one point, one child even comments on how good the ice cream looks, as if they’re trying to trick the audience into thinking these are real photos.
Simply, do not watch this. If you have already seen it, take steps to make sure nobody you know sees it — and maybe go and watch Spider-Man and The Odyssey again, just to remember what it’s like to give money to a movie that actually deserves it. Ice Cream Man somehow manages to do everything wrong and, due to the blatant and shameless AI use, I can’t even give it points for its somewhat okay gore. I’m not sure how Eli Roth has managed to work his way back into the director’s chair but I hope he’s finally locked out for good after this.