Taking a cue from the likes of Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Chucky, Candyman, and countless others, Horrormeister Eli Roth has now realized a 20 year dream to give the same fame in the genre to the Ice Cream Man in the simply titled new film, Ice Cream Man. That’s right. Roth hopes to immortalize the guy who drives around neighborhoods in that musical ice cream truck, the one kids have flocked to ever since wheels were invented. What he has created is just another excuse for mind-numbing graphic terror, but unfortunately has forgotten to provide much of a plot to keep us hooked. The filmmaker felt no studio would touch his vision of unfiltered gross-out dismemberings and the movie is being released unrated and under the moniker of The Horror Section, a new distributor Roth has created to put it into theatres.
Essentially the director is taking the idea of seeing kids unleashed to invoke whatever pain they can possibly muster on adults ala Home Alone but making it so gross-out bloodletting that it would get an NC 17 if a rating were slapped on it. What Roth, and his longtime screenwriting partner Noah Belson have concocted is an unfleshed-out idea that is just left with the flesh.
Opening on a typical sunny summer day in a fictional American small town called Bayleen Bay, we see a little league game in progress when an Ice Cream truck comes rolling in and the propreitor, a man with a creepy smile begins handing out free samples to all the kids. What a nice gesture. Uh, not. The ice cream man has revenge on his mind because as we will later discover via flashbacks, he was bullied and battered years earlier by the other kids in the town, leading to a miserable life. Now he is back, those kids are now the parents of a new generation that unknowingly is being weaponized thru his ice cream in order to have them kill their parents and everyone else over the age of 12. This is a man serving up double scoops of terror but the children are doing his bidding while he approvingly looks on.
When these kids march into the school the next day like zombies with colorful flavors of ice cream smeared across their mouths, the grown ups do not know what they are in for but about 15 minutes into what appeared to be just a nice idyllic film, all hell breaks loose and these kids one by one start chainsawing off heads, some unmentionable parts, legs, arms, hands , feet – you name it. They find new inventive uses for daddy’s power tools, make jumpropes out of guts, serve up scoops of the school principal’s brains, and well, you get the picture. Chopping up their parents and teachers has never been so much fun as these kids take command gleefully and with joy as the ice cream man (actor Ari Millen in a dialogue-less performance) leads the band. If all this sounds like your kind of entertainment, I suggest you check in with your therapist.
Roth is pretty gleeful himself, a director who has taken the genre to the limits in movies like 2002’s Cabin Fever, 2005’s torture porn Hostel , and the 2023 holiday horror flick Thanksgiving which was the feature film realization of a ludicrous fake theatrical trailer in Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse, but here he is really stretching the limits of taste, no doubt intentionally. Unfortunately the timing is off as this underdeveloped concept looks like a bad attempted imitation of last summer’s far superior Zach Cregger directed smash hit Oscar winning Weapons which had a similar idea of a whole town’s kids being mysteriously weaponized. Ice Cream Man feels like a (very) low budget attempt to capitalize and exploit, even if Roth has waited 20 years to get it made. Also it seems ill-timed since this year has also seen smart reinventions of the horror genre with the likes of Obsession and Backrooms finding critical acclaim and huge audiences. With this film though we are just back to basics with no ambition beyond finding ways to tear the human body apart that somehow we haven’t seen before. There is even one kid carrying around his severed mother’s head like a stuffed teddy bear. Sweet.
Now it does appear Roth and company are going for laughs in some ways, the absurdity of it all, and I must confess it works in one scene with a priest hiding from the ice cream man and delivering complex instructions to three kids who have thus far avoided the curse so they can break the spell and end this holy terror: “You kill the siren, you cut the Necromancer’s head off, he’ll be wearing a ceremonial cloak, but do not remove the hood, find the ice cream man and remove the hood, make the ice cream man look into the Necromancer’s eyes, that will kill him”.
Got all that? No spoiler alert on if the kids succeed in this daunting task, but it does all end with a spirited rap tune written and sung by none other than Snoop Dogg. “I Scream. You Scream. We Scream. ICE CREAM!”
Producers are Roth and Kate Harrison Karman.
Title: Ice Cream Man
Distributor: The Horror Section
Release Date: August 7, 2026
Director: Eli Roth
Screenplay: Eli Roth and Noah Belson
Cast: AriMillen, Benjamin Byron Davis, Eli Roth, Karen Cliche, Dylan Hawco, Sarah Abbott, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Charlie Zeltzer, Charlie Storey
Rating: Unrated
Running Time: 1 hour and 26 minutes
