A mousetrap to the foot, a skillet to the face, a drill to the ear, a plush rabbit down the throat. That’s the order in which one character gets slaughtered in Eli Roth’s latest gross-out horror comedy, “Ice Cream Man.”
While not a remake of Paul Norman’s deliciously nutty “Ice Cream Man” (1995), Roth’s sicko romp does share DNA with that and other films — “Mr. Ice Cream Man” (1996) and “The Ice Cream Truck” (2017) — that constitute one of horror’s dippier microgenres. It’s a welcome addition.
The jolt of this film — its sick pleasure, really — is that the butchers are sweet-faced kids in the grip of an unholy brain freeze caused by cursed frozen treats. No wonder a message on the title character’s ice cream truck warns: “Watch out for children.”
Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), a nebbishy boy who is lactose intolerant — a blessing, it turns out — suspects there’s something sketchy about an ice cream truck that blares a warped musical jingle as it circles his suburban neighborhood. At the window, below the truck’s dark-eyed soft serve cone mascot, an ice cream man (Ari Millen) in a crisp white uniform and red bow tie hands out frozen treats with names — the Creepy Crawly, the Serpent Swirl — that sound like they came from Satan’s own freezer.
Jared’s parents (Roth, along with Karen Cliche) and sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), aren’t as suspicious of this stranger as Jared is. That turns out to be a mistake, because the kids who one afternoon shovel ice cream down their throats turn into killing machines overnight, with parents, teachers and other adults as victims. As the cartoony carnage mounts, Jared and his not-possessed pals battle ice-cold supernatural forces that are burning with revenge.
Roth has said that when he and his “Ice Cream Man” co-writer Noah Belson get together, “We’re basically 12-year-olds.” It shows. Tonally, this film is the cinematic equivalent of a tween’s DQ Blizzard order: a frenzied mix of puerile comedy and stomach-churning jolts that leaves behind a scary-movie sugar rush and little else. That’s not necessarily an aspersion; summer horror runs on empty calories.
Horror fans will get a kick out of watching kids in grotesque “Dawn of the Dead”-like makeup play around with prop innards like they’re Slinkys and beat up older people. Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot’s stellar prosthetic makeup effects might sicken even the heartiest of gorehounds.
But under the grisly excess, Roth is dead serious about exploring what it means to love people who do the wrong things — the same kinds of manipulations and betrayals that Roth mined as far back as “Hostel” (2006) and as recently as “Thanksgiving” (2023). The cherry on top of “Ice Cream Man” is its unapologetically despairing conclusion.
Roth hit the jackpot with Millen. Grinning with a pervert’s mustache à la “Female Trouble”-era John Waters, Millen makes a macabre yet oddly debonair antagonist, a welcome departure from the barely believable ghouls of previous ice cream man horror movies. May this creep be the Halloween costume of 2026.
Ice Cream Man Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters.
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