Horror sinks to new lows with the ludicrously gory Ice Cream Man
Horror sinks to new lows with the ludicrously gory Ice Cream Man
Tim RobeySat, August 8, 2026 at 9:55 AM UTC
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Ari Millen stars as a psychotic ice cream van driver - Valerie Flores/The Horror Section
See if this story sounds familiar: a suburban town descends into savagery when its children are hexed and turn into feral killing machines. The laughably bad Ice Cream Man is rather like last year’s smash-hit horror Weapons, if you tried to spoof it with terrible production values and told it backwards. Nothing works: it’s absurd by accident, the gore is ludicrous and it boasts the lousiest acting ensemble I can recall in recent times.
The titular bad guy (Ari Millen, grinning sharkishly under a dubious moustache) uses the tinkling lure of his ice cream van to brainwash every child in town: one lick of a Mr Whippy and they become psychotic. Young hero Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) dodges the curse because he’s lactose intolerant, while for some reason his older sister (Sarah Abbott) becomes paralysed. Writer-director Eli Roth plays their largely oblivious father, and makes himself the victim of a crude twist: if you’re going to cameo in your own horror film, you might as well go all in.
Weapons deployed gore in brief, hideous splashes, and saved the best (or gnarliest) of its rampages for last. Here the gruesomeness gets upped tenfold, not in a realistic way, but in a prankster-ish, Looney Tunes way; it misfires because it shows us too much.
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Roth – he of the unlovely torture-porn shocker Hostel and the feeble sci-fi flop Borderlands – has had a field day with the practical effects department: a school principal, for instance, is shown being fed jelly-like portions of his own brain with an ice cream scoop. Various faces get caved in by heavy objects, to the point where they resemble messed-up jars of raspberry jam.
One taste of Ice cream sends the town’s children on a killing spree - Valerie Flores/The Horror Section
Even by the generally low standards this horror auteur has set, it’s garish junk, insurmountably ruined by his ineptitude at staging basic suspense or directing children. It’s obnoxious, too, with would-be edgy barbs about autism and bulimia. But Ice Cream Man isn’t even nasty in a way that gets under your skin. Imagine humouring someone as they spoil the punchline to a very dumb joke, only for them to keep telling you the same joke, over and over again.
In cinemas now
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
