No one can say horror filmmaker Eli Roth doesn’t have a sense of humor. The only question is whether or not he’s funny. “Ice Cream Man” is his latest sick joke, a gory “Children of the Corn” riff about a supernatural Pied Piper distributing frozen desserts that turn small children into homicidal maniacs. The first time you see a little kid chopping their parents to bits with a demented grin on their face it’s shocking. The second time it’s merely gross. After the hundredth time, it’s obvious that “Ice Cream Man” has only one gag. By the millionth, it’s just boring.
“Ice Cream Man” stars Charlie Zeltzer as Jared, a kid with more bullies than permanent teeth. It’s one of the last days of school, and all the kids in town just gorged themselves on ice cream from a mysterious new vendor, played by Ari Millen (“Orphan Black”). Jared is lactose intolerant, which isn’t a superpower — unless painful bloating was reclassified as a superpower and nobody told me — but it does mean he never eats the ice cream, so he’s one of the few kids who doesn’t fall under the Ice Cream Man’s spell.
The Ice Cream Man drives through town in the middle of the night, blaring an annoying jingle, which makes all the children get up, select a deadly instrument and murder their parents. Some kids are straightforward about it and rake a hacksaw across their mother’s neck. Others decide to get creative and trick their father into putting his hand down a garbage disposal before walking across the room and turning it on (you know how those garbage disposal switches are always across the room, right?). Then they set him on fire, because hey, you only get to kill your father once; I suppose you may as well make a night of it.
Yes, apparently killing the adults in town isn’t enough. The Ice Cream Man wants these children to use their imaginations. So we watch kids scraping their principal’s brains out with an ice cream scoop and feeding it back to him. Some of the kids use a lower intestine as a jump rope, a gag I think we all saw coming. The movie goes on like this. And on. And on. Everyone likes a good gross-out horror comedy, and even the bad ones can be fun, but the repetitive ones are another story. Or in the case of “Ice Cream Man,” they barely have a story at all.
“Ice Cream Man” is the latest in a long line of killer children movies. To date, I’m not convinced any filmmaker has ever beaten Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s “Who Can Kill a Child?” for its sheer audacity and horror. Fritz Kiersch’s adaptation of Stephen King’s short story “Children of the Corn” is more famous, but it leaves the scariest parts to the audience’s imagination, which makes it look like the film has no imagination of its own. Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion’s “Cooties” wasn’t afraid to go full “Dead Alive” in its climax — something, weirdly, Eli Roth refuses to do, despite going out of his way to foreshadow the lawnmower — and yet even that movie still made little impression.
All those other movies were about something, if only superficially. This made them feel like real movies. “Ice Cream Man” plays like a laundry list of “killer kids” gags, with the story, characters and even the explicitly stated message coming across like afterthoughts. There’s a reason why the Ice Cream Man makes all the children kill their parents, their teachers and every other adult in town. It’s a supernatural tale of revenge, distractingly derivative of “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” except Freddy Krueger’s motivation made diabolical sense. Without going into too much detail, the Ice Cream Man’s motivation is to punish adults, because adults are bad. But he’s punishing the adults for what they did as children, in the aftermath of their own victimization, so the whole concept falls apart.
You could argue the Ice Cream Man is a hypocrite, but Roth’s film never explores that possibility. It’s too shallow for a clever idea to swim in. The backstory for “Ice Cream Man” merely frames the ultraviolence as a dark catharsis, and that’s not convincing. Roth never stops winking long enough to get us invested, in anything. Even as a gag movie, a simplistic excuse for gruesome gore, it falls flat because you can’t sustain shock value when we don’t care who’s getting disemboweled. After a while, you’re just watching a make-up effects team show off.
And that’s the rub: It would be more exciting to watch a documentary about the professionals, weirdos and professional weirdos making the fake guts and disembodied limbs than to watch the film they were actually working on. “Ice Cream Man” is a hot fudge sundae without any ice cream, or any hot fudge. It’s just sprinkles and nuts. Nuts to that.
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