Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man rolls into town like the jingle of a summer ice cream truck—bright, inviting, and promising something sweet—only to deliver a sticky mess of blood, body parts, and diminishing returns. Clocking in at a lean 86 minutes, this unrated splatterfest from the director of Hostel and Thanksgiving takes a simple, gleefully nasty premise and runs it into the ground with the single-minded enthusiasm of a kid who’s had too much sugar.
The setup is pure high-concept B-movie bait. A silent, perpetually smiling ice cream vendor (Ari Millen) appears in an idyllic suburban town. His strangely named flavors—think Locust Lick and Serpent Swirl—turn the local children into blank-eyed, ice-cream-smeared homicidal maniacs. Parents, teachers, and anyone else in authority become fair game for inventive, schoolyard-inspired kills involving power tools, jump ropes made of intestines, and whatever else the pint-sized killers can get their sticky hands on. One lactose-intolerant kid, Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), remains immune and teams up with a couple of other holdouts to try to survive the kidpocalypse.
Roth leans hard into the gore, and the practical effects team delivers the goods. There are creative, stomach-churning set pieces that will satisfy die-hard splatter fans looking for nonstop carnage. Millen’s near-silent performance as the enabler of all this chaos is the film’s strongest asset—chilling in its restraint while everything around him descends into chaos. The movie knows exactly what it is: a knowing, tongue-in-cheek bloodbath that treats the corruption of childhood innocence as both joke and spectacle.
Unfortunately, once the initial shock of “kids turning into killers via ice cream” wears off, there’s not much else holding the cone together. The plot is paper-thin, the attempts at dark humor often land with a thud, and the eventual backstory feels like a rushed Nightmare on Elm Street knockoff that never quite justifies the mayhem. Characters beyond Jared and the Ice Cream Man himself barely register, and the film’s “look how edgy and tasteless we are” attitude starts to feel more like contempt for the audience than playful provocation. At times it plays like a demo reel of kills rather than a fully realized movie, lacking the suspense or escalating ingenuity that made Thanksgiving more satisfying.
Ice Cream Man will absolutely work for viewers who just want an unrated, no-holds-barred gore delivery system and don’t mind the empty calories. Everyone else may find themselves wishing Roth had spent a little more time on story, tone, or actual scares instead of just piling on the sprinkles of blood. It’s the cinematic equivalent of eating an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting: briefly fun, quickly nauseating, and best forgotten once the sugar crash hits.
- Email: neill@outloudculture.com
- Socials: @frazer.live
- @neill.outloud
