Ice Cream Man

Having popularized the "torture porn" genre in the mid-00s, a layering of American sensibilities onto the depravity of the then-thriving New French Extremity movement, writer/director Eli Roth will always loom large in the history of horror. This despite his frankly terrible track record. With the exception of Thanksgiving (and Fin, a shark documentary that no one saw), he's received nothing more than a golf clap since his seminal work. Borderlands and Knock Knock are notorious misfires (albeit in wildly different directions), and the rest of his output is largely unworthy of mention. But given his whole hog embrace of horror, including the most unsavory bits, you'd be justified in expecting his joints to at least be audacious. That was true of the unrelated, mid-90s cult classic of the same name, which also demonstrated the potential of an ice cream truck driver villain: the threat of his proximity to children combined with its huge, goofy swings and committed performance from Clint Howard make for a grand old time, despite its shoddy construction rife with continuity errors and nonsense dialog.

It had the benefit of being made when filmmakers couldn't rely on computer graphics, so every goopy, tainted bit of frozen dairy product looked good enough to eat. Therein lies the rub; Roth demonstrates no creativity in executing the overwhelming amounts of violence (and dessert) throughout the movie. A few of the set pieces are well-drawn up, a veritable Where's Waldo? of cartoonish insanity, but the final product manages to be so bland and weightless as to float away after it's completion. His overreliance on CGI (and some generative AI¹) combine with a lack of care to render the whole thing quite ugly, before beginning to consider the narrative.

The plot he settled on is a mashup of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Weapons (which notably hit theaters a month before Roth wrapped filming), seasoned with zombie tropes. And there's a teen romance (kind of). And a shot that pays homage to The Birds so loudly that it undermines what makes the construction so indelible. Frankenstein-ing together so many parts means all get short shrift, drained of all meaning in favor of plundering their iconography.

A mysterious ice cream truck appears out of nowhere in the fictional New England town of Bayleen Bay, and its proprietor (Ari Millen) starts giving out ice cream to all the kids. In the wee hours of the morning, he slowly drives through the suburban streets, activating his newly created sleeper agents. All have developed dark bags all around their sunken eyes, their mouths stained by ice cream, with sprinkles and other toppings glued to their chins. Only, it's unclear if anyone but the audience can see these obvious visual signifiers of corruption: one parent asks her child if they've been eating more ice cream, but every other parent is oblivious to the possibility something is wrong - until the very moment their sweet baby angel begins to gruesomely murder them.

For the next sixty minutes or so, that's about all the plot development we get. The next day we follow a few unaffected kids throughout the relentless chaos unfolding at their middle school. Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) is lactose intolerant, so he couldn't eat it. He saw Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) vomiting it up earlier, which she explains as something all 12-year-old girls know how to do, a "joke" whose tastelessness manages to stand out despite all that surrounds it (including the Ice Cream Man's similarly incongruous and baffling backstory). And Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly)...I guess he just...doesn't like ice cream? In any case, they run around the school aimlessly, overly foul-mouthed for their age, but not enough to constitute a stylistic choice, for better or for worse. Sometimes they're trying to escape, and sometimes trying to figure out what's going on, but never to any effect. Roth has plenty of chances to stage creative violence, but mostly whiffs. Brutality enacted by young kids is inherently upsetting, but the sloppy execution leaves you feeling more cold than anything else.

It's not until they're joined by Jared's high schooler sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), and her ex-boyfriend, Chris (Dylan Hawco), that any forward momentum returns, eventually resulting in a completely unnecessary and nonsensical backstory for the Ice Cream Man that calls the specifics of his plan into question. Back up for a moment; why are they unaffected? I'm glad you asked, as it's another crack in the flimsiest story wall you ever did see. Chris has his own lawn mowing business, so wasn't around when the Ice Cream Man came by. A missed opportunity, but fine. Lizzie, however, did eat it. But she only wakes up paralyzed, because that's the effect it has on teens. What's the Ice Cream Man's issue with adding teenagers to his zombie army? No idea, nor is it illuminated once we're told his whole deal. Even more strangely, it very specifically paralyzes her arms, and just her arms. So we're forced to watch an entire, agonizingly dumb scene as this girl worms and flops her way across her bedroom floor until she can make it to the bathroom and violently make herself throw up. It's truly staggering in how stupid and uncomfortable it is.

There are some laughs to be had, rarely due to intentional jokes and deliberate absurdity, and more often from the shocking incompetence on display. Long stretches are played fairly straight, accompanied by an appropriately dour score that aims to direct your feelings at any given moment, since the script sure as hell cannot hope to inspire any feeling. The entire experience is a slog from start to finish despite being less than ninety minutes with credits. Even the few creative kills that slip in can't alleviate the boredom, especially since we're introduced to precious few of the victims beforehand, giving us no reason to root for their demise. It's an artless film with little entertainment value and made using questionable techniques by a filmmaker whose greatest creative achievement in the past twenty years was distributing someone else's project.

Ironic, then, that The Horror Section was created to be a vanity label. It continues to be a solid avenue for a certain type of low-rent, 80s-inflected horror subgenre brought into the modern era; a trailer for the upcoming Stiletto showed particular promise. But the more time passes, the clearer it becomes that it's best to avoid the very projects that gave it reason to exist.