Director: Eli Roth
Writer: Eli Roth, Noah Belson
Stars: Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O’Reilly
Synopsis: An idyllic summer town descends into madness when an ice cream man serves kids sweet delights with horrifying results.
When Thanksgiving released, I foolishly thought we finally saw an evolution in Eli Roth’s filmmaking. Known for mostly controversial and explicitly violent pictures, the American director finally made something of substance, where its horrors were vividly expressed and cogently transformed our mindless “don’t ask questions just consume product and get excited for next product” population into Romerian zombies. The Black Friday scene remains the best thing he’s ever done, and it genuinely made me excited to see what he would do next in the world of genre cinema, words I never uttered when describing the corpus of films Roth brought to life.
Then came Borderlands. Seeing it in a theater gave me COVID. The less said about that one, the better.
While Thanksgiving 2 has been announced, development on the picture has seemingly stalled and, in the meantime, Roth has gone full steam ahead in creating The Horror Section, a media company focused solely on distributing horror content across multiple formats. His first directorial effort from this creation, Ice Cream Man, finally arrives in theatres this weekend. It is not a remake of Norman Apstein’s 1995 direct-to-video slasher picture, although one can’t really fault anyone for thinking this way, as Roth’s “inspirations” are mostly just carbon copies of other, better, horror movies, in the hopes that the audience doesn’t notice.
There’s one scene in the film that’s a direct ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, where crows slowly make their way to the school’s playground while Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is smoking a cigarette. Instead of crows, we have a horde of possessed kids who, after eating ice cream from the titular Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen), become mind-controlled killers who wreak havoc on a seemingly innocuous town. Some filmmakers will wear the influences that have clearly inspired them on their sleeves, but Roth has no discernible style of his own. He thus reverts to the “horror classics,” because that’s all he can do.
The conceit itself is not “bad” – who doesn’t find Ice Cream Men who stalk around suburban neighborhoods creepy? However, the execution more than lacks any form of wit or energy. Roth’s images are flatly composed and lazily edited. The film’s senseless violence of children decapitating their parents, shoving a dental tool in their ears, or chopping their fingers in a vegetable grinder is always played for “shock” and thus has little to no emotional or cathartic impact. Compared to the violence in Thanksgiving, which was also senseless, yet had something to say about the mindless generation we’re in, Ice Cream Man is a complete nothingburger.
Ice Cream Man seems to draw a parallel between consumerist society’s obsession with screens and junk food, but never in a way that feels genuinely meaningful. We’re instead stuck in a cyclical rut of explicit violence that quickly numbs us, as we soon realize the movie is heading nowhere interesting, despite a twist that aims to take this story into darker territory than it already is. Without spoiling anything, that “twist” is possibly the most audience-insulting thing I’ve seen all year, something you can see coming a mile away but still pisses you off when it is laid bare on screen.
The bulk of the movie essentially follows three child characters, lactose-intolerant Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), bulimic Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), and rebel Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly), who don’t conform to the masses that are immediately tantalized by the prospect of ice cream. Wait, scratch that – Mia ate the ice cream, but threw it up, with one of the most offensive lines I’ve ever heard in a horror movie that justifies portraying a harrowing eating disorder like bulimia this way. When asked if she ate the ice cream that turns you into a mind-controlled zombie, Mia responds: “I’m a twelve-year-old girl, I know how to make myself throw up!” Do I even need to explain why this line is highly problematic, let alone terribly insensitive? God!
As the film progresses, Roth attempts to expand upon the mythology of the Ice Cream Man through a Catholic figure, played by Benjamin Byron Davis. He explains the character’s origins through a flashback that almost definitely features AI-generated imagery. I do not want to fully state one way or the other, as a recent interview with Roth explained that AI was not used for the animated jingle sequences for the Ice Cream Man, but none discussed the flashback scenes, where visual effects look as chintzy as the AI slop featured in Radu Jude’s Dracula. With the AI-driven VFX company Dark Half mentioned in the end credits, one can sense that generative artificial intelligence was undoubtedly used to create images featured in the flashback – and it looks terrible.
If AI was indeed used, anyone who has been dubbing Roth a “talentless hack” for years will be the most vindicated people in the universe. If no AI was used at all, it doesn’t matter. The movie is still a cheaply made, dull, and inept slasher that wants to provoke but has no thought of its own, just the same boring kills for 86 interminable minutes. The jokes are unfunny (Roth’s idea of humor involves name-dropping “Tony Robbins” and “Mitt Romney”), the performances are unconvincing, and the gore doesn’t possess the same genuine thrills as Sébastien Vaniček’s Evil Dead Burn.
Only composer Brandon Roberts’ jingles provide Ice Cream Man with its signs of life, but when the music is the only (slightly) redeeming thing about your movie, there’s a massive problem. While Eli Roth has always championed outsider art and underground movies, with The Horror Section sounding like a good idea to expose audiences to filmmakers they might not have heard of, this experiment has so far proven itself futile. However, it might be a good idea for Roth to keep making such listless junk like this, so anyone who might have been interested in his filmography, like me, will no longer pay attention to what he’s doing. I was fooled that Thanksgiving would mark an evolution in his filmography, but I am fooled no longer.
