A demonic ice cream vendor transforms the children of an idyllic American suburb into relentless killers in Ice Cream Man, opening in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. Eli Roth‘s latest horror feature serves up outrageous practical gore with all the gleeful excess of Herschell Gordon Lewis, but about the same amount of filmmaking finesse as the godfather of splatter cinema. A dramatic step backward after the surprisingly polished Thanksgiving, or even the box office bomb Borderlands, it’s one of the most amateurish films you’ll see receive a wide theatrical release, though that clumsiness gives it a peculiar appeal of its own.
Top-billed Ari Millen plays the silent titular ice cream vendor, who cruises through the quiet town of Bayleen Bay dispensing frozen treats with sinister flavors like Serpent Swirl and Locust Lick. The children who consume his ice cream soon become murderous zombies, turning on parents, teachers, and anyone unfortunate enough to cross their path. A handful of youngsters who never ate (or vomited) the tainted treats—including bullied middle-schooler Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), his older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), and two classmates—must survive the carnage while trying to uncover the mysterious origins of the ice cream man himself.
Roth establishes Bayleen Bay as an almost idyllic slice of small-town America where simmering tensions lurk beneath manicured lawns and Little League games, recalling the suburban unease of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Unfortunately, that’s where any meaningful comparison ends: once the children begin their killing spree 20 minutes in, Ice Cream Man abandons nearly all narrative momentum. For the next hour, the plot barely advances beyond a series of increasingly elaborate murder sequences as the surviving characters simply flee from one attack to the next.
Only in the final fifteen minutes does the story lurch back into motion, thanks almost entirely to Benjamin Byron Davis, who suddenly appears as a priest to deliver a lengthy exposition dump explaining the ice cream man’s supernatural origins. Davis brings a welcome intensity to the role and effortlessly upstages nearly everyone else in the film despite only appearing for five minutes late in the game. It’s the only point where Ice Cream Man feels interested in its own mythology rather than merely finding new ways to dismember bodies.
That lack of dramatic progression might have been forgivable had the individual scenes generated any genuine suspense, but Roth’s direction consistently undercuts the horror. The performances frequently feel awkward in a way that seems intentional. Actors stumble through dialogue and hesitate over simple physical actions, and the camera lingers in oddly-staged moments where most directors would have cut away (one bizarre shot of a character struggling to set his phone down on a park bench perfectly encapsulates this strange rhythm). In a low-budget independent production, these rough edges might be charming. Here, in an otherwise polished studio release, they feel like a director deliberately hanging his cast out to dry.
The child performers fare particularly poorly, though the blame lies more with the direction than the acting itself. They never convincingly embody either terrifying killers or traumatized victims; unlike the unsettling youngsters of classics such as Who Can Kill a Child? or Children of the Corn, Roth’s murderous children simply go through the motions. Their attacks feel mechanical rather than disturbing, robbing the central premise of much of its potential.
But the gore itself is often spectacular. Roth stages several genuinely jaw-dropping practical effects sequences, including one showstopper in which a teacher’s skull is sliced open before his own brain is scooped out and fed back to him—a sequence that unmistakably recalls Ray Liotta‘s infamous scene in Hannibal. The squishy, queasy effects work here is presented with an infectious glee and technical proficiency that rises above anything else in the movie.
Yet even these moments land with surprising flatness. Victims don’t resist, and the possessed children kill without menace or personality. There’s almost no atmosphere, and virtually no tension. Realizing this too late, the filmmakers resort to aggressive post-production shaky-cam during action scenes in a transparent attempt to inject energy into material that remains stubbornly lifeless.
Cinematographer Simon Shohet bucks the modern horror trend toward murky, underlit imagery by bathing Ice Cream Man‘s Bayleen Bay in vivid daylight, bright colors, and crisp compositions that evoke nostalgic visions of suburban America, convincingly recreated in locations outside Toronto. Brandon Roberts’ main musical theme also nicely captures the cheerful atmosphere before the violence erupts, though the score during horror scenes is poorly utilized, and the overall sound design often feels oddly empty, with a surprising lack of ambient texture throughout. The endlessly repeating ice cream truck jingle (“Ring a ding ding, ring ding dong…”) at least proves maddeningly catchy.
As a final insult, the film incorporates several brief animated sequences depicting the thoughts of the possessed children that appear to have been generated through AI: their inconsistent, artificial sketchbook look sticks out immediately against the rest of the production. While generative AI has unquestionably become commonplace in modern filmmaking, its implementation here feels especially lazy.
For most moviegoers—and especially horror fans accustomed to recent standouts like Weapons, Backrooms, or Obsession—Ice Cream Man is likely to feel like a bottom-of-the-barrel disappointment, sacrificing story, suspense, and atmosphere in favor of repetitive splatter. Yet there’s an undeniable charm to its ineptitude. Like the films of Herschell Gordon Lewis or Troma, it’s assembled with enough colorful practical gore and bizarre creative choices that bad movie devotees may eventually embrace it as a cult curiosity. For everyone else, this frozen treat melts into little more than empty calories.
