For kids in suburban Anytown U.S.A., what’s more delightful than an afternoon visit from the ice cream man? The tinny music tinkling from low-quality speakers, the drivers’ anachronistic white uniforms and silly hats, the promise of cream and sugar and food dye distilled into the melty shapes of video game characters and superheroes—it’s quintessential American kitsch, right down to the Pavlovian bell jingling its arrival on your very street. Paradise never felt so close to home.
All of which makes this iconic vehicle of adolescent joy ripe for exploitation for a cinematic sadist like Eli Roth. In his latest feature Ice Cream Man (opening Friday in theaters), co-writer and director Roth luxuriates in subverting the mobile delivery of ice cream into a kind of demonic programming.
One day, in a small town that could very well be your own, following an after-school baseball game in the anticipatory final week of the school year, the neighborhood children partake in the goodies of their local ice cream truck. By that very night, every child who enjoyed the sweet treat has begun the process of slaughtering his or her parents, along with any authority figure they come across. And given that this is a Roth film, the means and methods of murder are expectedly grotesque, with everything from microscopes and golf balls and bicycles to good old-fashioned hatchets and buzzsaws and kitchen garbage disposals employed for maximum splatter.
Around the first of these gruesome onscreen patricides, there will doubtless be a fair share of walkouts across American cinemas. Those who check out early won’t be missing much. I managed by laughing through much of these scenes, a Roth-approved response; one way to dull the mountain of burnings and disembowelments and decapitations is to approach Ice Cream Man as a black comedy.
Roth does have a genuine ear for both corny dad jokes and the skewed minds of modern teenagers. To wit, as we follow the only three kids in town who haven’t consumed the ice cream—and with it the poison that transforms their cohort into homicidal maniacs—we learn that one of them, 12-year-old Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), is bulimic: She’s protected by her unhealthy body issues. (Charlie Zeltzer’s Jared, meanwhile, is lactose-intolerant, a condition that is finally, for this oft-bullied character, a blessing.) Roth’s funniest line is uttered by one of the teachers, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll’s Mr. Hamlin, who, unable to get through to a classroom full of catatonic children with ice cream-smudged faces, murderous minds, and the clothes they slept in, wonders, “Is this some sort of zombie pajama day challenge?”
But there comes a point when the comedy begins to leave an acrid aftertaste, and even horror aficionados, numbed by the pointless onslaught of ornate bloodshed, will lose their patience waiting for Roth to get to the point. How many times must we revel in the surface-level contrast of blood spattering onto cheerful décor? It’s around this juncture that we’re frontloaded with exposition, delivered by a priest cowering in a walk-in freezer, that inserts a moral lecture on xenophobia into the proceedings. This revelation is too opaque to register as anything but an overly convoluted justification for the film’s half-baked mayhem.
Mostly, Ice Cream Man falters because of its reliance on recycled tropes. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Children of the Corn, Weapons, Necromancer—all of these horror antecedents are exhumed over the film’s meager 86 minutes. One sequence pays homage to iconic imagery from The Shining and The Birds; even the movie’s fictional setting, Bayleen Bay, conjures Bodega Bay’s Technicolor menace from the latter film. Roth remains a pastiche artist, albeit one with a solid camera eye and a jester’s talent for lunacy and misdirection. In our era of elevated horror, this isn’t enough—and it’s about as satisfying to the palate as low-fat ice cream.
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