Most Eli Roth fans will turn on Ice Cream Man hoping for 90 minutes or so of excruciating brutal, inventive and gratuitous gore. And those fans won’t be disappointed. If you want to see a child stabbing their mother with garden shears, or a gang of kids cutting the top off their principal’s head, scooping out the brain, and then forcing him to eat it as he shudders and chokes, this is the movie for you!
Like Roth, I’m a fan of George Romero and Sam Raimi. I like The Birds, too, and enjoyed his clever jungle-gym shout out. I appreciated the cartoonishly cheerful carnage on display, not least in Roth’s bloody-minded refusal to provide anything like redemption or uplift. But given Roth’s past work, I thought there might be some pointedly ugly thematic material to go along with the ugly pointed objects pounded into bodily parts. Like low-budget ice cream, the product here didn’t live up to the anticipation.
Roth’s narrative is a suitably simple vehicle for delivering nightmarish visuals. A picturesque suburban enclave is visited by a truck helmed by the creepy Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen). Kids eagerly purchase ice cream, and then (in a twist) the ice cream transforms them into remorseless zombie killers. Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) is spared because he’s lactose intolerant, and he and a couple of other unaffected peers attempt to avoid the ravening infantile hordes and save the town.
Roth has, in past efforts, been good at using horror dynamics to sharpen hate into a double-edged ax. The Hostel films, for example, are gloriously vicious in part because you’re half-rooting for the evil Eastern Europeans as they tease, torture and then eviscerate the insufferable, privileged evil American tourists. Stereotypes of debased, immoral easterners slice into stereotypes of debased, immoral westerners and vice versa, unleashing gouts of bloody giggling schadenfreude in every direction.
Roth gestures at acknowledging and leveraging analogous tensions in Ice Cream Man. The Ice Cream Man himself is possibly an immigrant who was ostracized by the townspeople. And the film alludes to the fact that adults can manipulate, abuse and harm children. Hostel encourages you to root for the Americans to get what’s coming to them; Ice Cream Man leaves the freezer door open for you to lick your lips as the kids gut and bludgeon their elders as well.
Leaving the door open isn’t the same as pushing you through it, though. Roth never shows you parents or teachers bullying children, emotionally or physically—with one exception who’s not shown and not punished. The adults we meet are sometimes annoyingy and sometimes exasperating as they demand kids go to school or follow rules. But they aren’t cruel. They don’t taunt kids, or humiliate them, or hit them, as adults often do in real life.
The adults in the film are mostly indistinguishable from one another. The kids target them equally because there’s no reason to discriminate. There’s no sickeningly righteous charge as a child executes an adult who’s been tormenting them specifically, because no adult ever torments a child specifically. Similarly, the xenophobia directed at the Ice Cream Man is recounted in flashback, and the people who perpetrated it don’t suffer for it. Their children do, but that’s a different emotional and ethical dynamic.
The film isn’t meant to be a parable. The problem is that, by largely stepping around the issues it raises, it ends up significantly less mean-spirited than it could be. In his best movies, Roth builds on moral intuitions and prejudices to create an escalating spiral of vindictiveness, as you root for everyone to revenge themselves on everyone else in a catharsis of sadism. Ice Cream Man is nauseating on first bite. But when it comes back up, it’s a little bland.