A few years ago, Eli Roth realized his long-held ambition to make a movie out of Thanksgiving, the horror-movie trailer he made as a gag for the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez anthology feature Grindhouse, back in 2007. Though he didn’t actually go so far as to make the scratched-up decades-ago slasher shown in the original trailer, Thanksgiving was still Roth’s most satisfying movie in ages, replete with ridiculous gore and a side of satirical commentary – a 2020s movie fit for an old video store’s VHS horror section despite its contemporary setting.
Now Roth has founded a horror-focused company actually called the Horror Section, aimed at releasing movies, shows and “experiences” that appeal to the modern equivalent of those VHS-shelf gorehounds. After “presenting” a few other movies, Roth’s first direct contribution to the company is Ice Cream Man, exactly the kind of knowingly disreputable button-pusher befitting the company’s retro-sticker logo. (Indeed, Roth’s movie shares its title with a 1995 direct-to-video curiosity starring Clint Howard, though this one is unrelated.) Unfortunately, rather than a companion piece to the blackly funny murder-mystery of Thanksgiving, which riffed on Scream as much as 80s slashers, Roth’s latest feels like a demo reel for someone vastly less talented.
Then again, Roth’s talent for bloody provocation has flowed and ebbed over the years, from the pointed nastiness of the Hostel movies to the snide grotesquerie of The Green Inferno. Ice Cream Man isn’t trying for the latter’s score-settling, but it retains a dim edgelord sensibility in its simple premise, bluntly executed. A mysterious, creepy-looking ice-cream man (Ari Millen) rolls into a suburban enclave, and when local kids get a taste of his cursed treats, they turn into feral, zombie-like killers. Unlike zombies, they avail themselves of whatever makeshift weapons they can find; parents, teachers and passersby are murdered by the dozen. Twelve-year-old Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), however, positioned early on as a lovable loser, is lactose-intolerant, leaving him impervious to the free ice-cream and therefore unharmed – though still in danger, as the crazed kids often force-feed those who don’t partake. Sticking with fellow non-infected kids Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), and eventually assisted by his older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), Jared attempts to figure out how to stop this town-wide madness and keep it from spreading further.
Early on, the winking transgression of seeing a bunch of weapon-wielding kids annihilate adults in some truly horrifying ways (and observing adults mostly too ginger to fight back occasionally summing the courage to counterattack) offers distraction from the slapdash swearing-kiddies dialogue Roth and co-writer Noah Belson lazily assign their young actors. But as inventive as some of the gore gets, the movie also never does any better than unleashing it – and when so much of that gore features bad CG blood spatter, the ugliness of the violence is eclipsed by the chintziness of the movie’s cut-rate aesthetics. The whole thing looks cheap as hell, with that sickly hyperreal digital sheen that makes so many attempts at slick indies more closely resemble a corporate training piece or amateur music video. There’s no grime or texture to anything here, rendering the gnarly kill scenes as phoney and frictionless as Roth’s half-assed-at-best characterizations.
And really, those kills are all Ice Cream Man has; unlike Hostel, there aren’t any attempts made to turn the screws of suspense. The eventual backstory is a low-impact Freddy Krueger knockoff that might pass muster in an actual artifact of the 80s-slasher boom, but here feels like a rush job, the kind of thing Roth might have riffed about with his pal Tarantino in the wee hours of the morning. It’s easy to picture that conversation lasting longer than the screenplay’s eventual drafting. The whole thing is made with the swaggering confidence of someone whose friends laugh at his every joke – and the haphazard efficiency of someone who needs to get product to the marketplace for strategic Q3 growth. The Horror Section is supposed to offer edgier fare to the ravenous, enthusiastic genre fans. With this soft serve, it feels like it’s feeding them mainly contempt.
