‘Ice Cream Man’ Review: Eli Roth’s Summer Treat Melts Before It Reaches the Finish Line
- More Horror
- Aug 3
- 6 min read
By Seth Metoyer, MoreHorrorMovies.com -
*This review contains spoilers. Proceed with caution.
Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man opens with a Little League baseball game, and for several minutes, I thought the movie had discovered the perfect doorway into its particular brand of summertime horror.
The kids argue, posture and perform the ancient rituals of the neighborhood ball field. There are nerds, bullies, swaggering players and young coaches already practicing the authoritarian confidence they will someday bring to homeowners’ association meetings. Even the umpire looks like a kid who happens to be two years older than everyone else and has managed to grow a scraggly mustache and a few ambitious strands of chin hair.
At one point, he throws his arms out and yells, “SAFE! SAFE! SAFE!” toward both dugouts and seemingly half the surrounding county. It made me cackle outloud.
I remembered those games from my own childhood in the 1980s, when several teams would play across the same dusty complex and an absent umpire could result in one of the older kids getting recruited to call a younger game. I loved The Bad News Bears. I also loved horror movies. Plenty of Gen-X kids did. We could spend the afternoon arguing over a strike zone and the evening watching something claw its way out of a grave.
The opening realizes the ecosystem beautifully. It captures how childhood summers once felt endless, unsupervised and slightly dangerous even before the monster arrived.
The creepy ice cream truck rolls into town. The truck looks great. So does Ari Millen as the Ice Cream Man, a clammy, socially malformed figure who resembles the kind of neighborhood eccentric every kid instinctively watches from the opposite side of the street. The production gives him the right vehicle, the right wardrobe and the right unnerving presence. He looks as though someone left the town nerd inside a freezer for twenty years and thawed him out with several major grievances intact.
The premise also t0uts the uncomplicated appeal of a playground urban legend. Children eat the Ice Cream Man’s frozen treats and become homicidal, blue-lipped zombies; or possessed sugar fiends, depending on how precisely one wants to diagnose the condition. The town quickly fills with pint-sized killers, nervous parents and enough improvised carnage to make the local summer recreation department reconsider its liability coverage.
Roth clearly understands the joke. Childhood innocence becomes the weapon and that soothing melody of the ice cream truck becomes a dinner bell for murder. It moves forward like The Children filtered through The Bad News Bears, with a helping of Freddy Krueger mythology scooped on top.
The flick also comes with the built-in expectation attached to Roth’s name. This is the filmmaker behind Cabin Fever, Hostel and The Green Inferno, movies that knew how to convert bodily destruction into an entire cinematic philosophy. Even when Roth’s films divided audiences, they usually displayed a sharp commitment to their own madness.
Ice Cream Man feels strangely casual by comparison.
The cinematography, sound design and general presentation often feel like an extremely low-budget production. I have produced more than twenty independent features, so I recognize that texture immediately. Wonder if that was on purpose?
You learn to spot the hastily dressed room, the thin ambience, the coverage designed to get everyone home before overtime and the scene that technically works while still feeling one careful pass away from truly landing.
A family dinner sequence featuring Roth in a small role especially locked the film into that B-movie register for me. The modest approach may represent a deliberate attempt to recreate the bargain-bin horror aesthetic of an earlier era. Either way, the finished result frequently resembles one of the regional horror productions Roth’s name once promised to elevate.
The kills provide intermittent fun. The practical effects deliver several gooey sights worthy of the premise, and Roth remains fluent in the visual grammar of splatter. The problem lies in the staging surrounding those effects. Several deaths feel rushed, loosely blocked or presented with so little dramatic pressure that the gore becomes the entire sentence rather than its exclamation point.
A severed body part can get a reaction. A well-constructed scene makes us anticipate it, dread it and laugh when the movie finally drops it into our lap. The film’s central stretch also tests the limits of its concept. For nearly an hour, children roam through town in a murderous trance. They attack adults, force-feed ice cream to other kids and shuffle from one set piece to the next like a zombie outbreak sponsored by Baskin-Robbins.
To me, this would have made excellent material for a vicious 20- or 30-minute short. At 86 minutes, it begins to feel like a short film wearing a feature-length trench coat. Even thought Ice Cream Man never lacks activity (people screaming, children attacking, cones dripping, bodies dropping...etc.), yet movement and momentum remain different cinematic substances. The movie keeps moving while the story waits for its final act to arrive.
The mythology eventually becomes more interesting than the rampage. A necromancer offers a falsely accused ice cream man the chance to punish the parents who once blamed him for horrific crimes. The arrangement carries an unmistakable whiff of Elm Street: a wronged monster, guilty adults and children inheriting the blood debt of the previous generation.
A preacher explains how the surviving kids can stop the Ice Cream Man. The ritual requires them to dig up a grave, remove a head without looking directly at it and present it to their tormentor. The sequence plays like a suburban-horror riff on Medusa’s decapitation from Clash of the Titans. It also gives the kids something more compelling to do than stumble through another attack scene.
Most of the plan works. Then the severed head reveals one last surprise, a plot twist that actually provides the movie’s strongest moment. I will preserve it here, since the reveal deserves to reach viewers intact. It introduces a clever final wrinkle into the revenge plot and briefly delivers the wicked storybook energy the rest of the film keeps reaching toward.
For a few minutes, Ice Cream Man feels like a campfire tale told by the one kid whose older brother owns an R-rated VHS collection.
The young cast handles the material well. Child actors can flatten horror when their performances feel overly polished or directed toward cuteness. These kids generally behave like recognizable kids: brave until they panic, cruel when the group allows it and capable of accepting supernatural instructions with the practical urgency of completing a scavenger hunt.
The film’s early baseball scenes reveal what Roth might have built around them. There is something rich in the collision between childhood nostalgia and childhood savagery. Anyone who remembers neighborhood games also remembers the social hierarchies, miniature tyrants, wounded pride and casual brutality that existed beneath the sunshine.
The Ice Cream Man turns the knob for the viewer but lets the creaking drag on for too long. I wanted more escalation, texture and precision from a filmmaker with Roth’s instincts. I wanted the town to feel alive before it descended into madness, the Ice Cream Man himself to command more of the film rather than functioning largely as the distributor of its supernatural problem. I wanted the murders to build toward something beyond the accumulating body count.
Perhaps Roth made the film as a tribute to the movies and memories that shaped him: neighborhood summers, disreputable VHS horror and the glorious moment when adults stopped paying attention. He has reportedly carried the idea for years, and that personal attachment makes sense.
The m0vie mostly feels like a story someone dreamed up as a horror-obsessed kid and finally gained the resources to shoot as an adult. I think his affection reaches the screen, but so does the thinness of the original idea.
There are some bloody kills, a creepy villain, a final jolt, and enough sticky practical gore to satisfy viewers looking for a late-summer horror diversion. The opening made me remember why childhood and horror have always belonged together. The rest just left me wondering why such a simple treat required this much time to serve.
Ice Cream Man promises an unhinged summer sugar rush. What arrives feels closer to a cone forgotten on the sidewalk: brightly colored, briefly tempting, yet already melting under the heat.
