I know I always bring this up whenever I review a movie from Eli Roth, but it never ceases to confound me that he was once hailed as the future and major spokesperson of the horror genre in the 2000s. History has obviously of revealed this to a fair bit of hot air despite the fact that I think that Cabin Fever and the two Hostel movies he made stand up pretty well for the time they were released. However, due to various reasons, Roth has become something of a polarizing figure, be it various political views or his use of non-PC humour. Of course, those who abhor his filmmaking traits should probably avoid his new film, Ice Cream Man (no relation to the Clint Howard slasher from the 90s), like the plague, but I have to admit, even for someone who has followed his career for it’s entirety and enjoyed fair chunks of it (we don’t talk about Borderlands), something seems to have gone fairly wrong.
While no doubt you’ve seen many hysterical, vitriolic, videos posted online already (my social media was rotten with them literally thirty minutes before I went into the cinema), I’m going to try and keep this balanced – but it seems that Roth’s new effort really does have the public screaming for ice cream. It’s just the wrong kind of screaming…
The absurdly picturesque town of Bayleen Bay is about to get something of a horrific wake-up call after a game of little league baseball means that all the winners and losers get treated with ice cream. However, team misfit Jared has to sit it out due to being lactose intolerant, but while everyone gorges themselves on frosty, dairy treats with counterintuitive names like Locust Lick and Serpent Swirl, the kid notices that the ice cream man who is doling out these snacks seems pretty weird.
However, by next morning, every small child who has consumed any of the ice cream man’s wares have become vicious psychopaths with red-rimmed eyes and rainbow-coloured smears on their sprinkles-covered mouths, who grab the first tool they can get their hands on and start slaughtering every adult they can find. Despite being weirdly slow on the uptake, soon Jared and fellow unaffected kids, Mia and Tommy, have to barricade themselves at school while their teachers are torn to shreds by the bloodthirsty brats.
Realising that if they don’t discover some way to break the Ice Cream Man’s spell, everyone in Bayleen Bay will either be dead or be under the thrall of the dessert-serving dickhead, the trio of kids run a gauntlet of noticably up-beat gore to try and get to the bottom of everything. But after some unexpected exposition from a surprise source, it seems like they have the information they need to put the freeze on the Ice Cream Man’s antics for good. However, to do so, they’ll have to wade though an veritable army of terrible tots to try and save the day.
While there’s a lot of reasons people have come to throw critical rocks at Eli Roth’s latest (his un-PC sense of humour, the movie’s rather obvious use of generative AI, Roth himself), I have to say that none of these issues struck me as the main problem that Ice Cream Man suffers from. If you’re shocked at Roth’s mean-spirited, frat boy jokes at such targets as bulimia, then you just haven’t been paying attention to the taboo-free stance he’s displayed in his films from day one. His films have always contained large quantities of idiocy-spewing douchebags who mostly get some sort of hideous fate and by now it’s about as shocking as water being wet. Similarly, while his use of generative AI is fairly obvious, it also looks pretty shitty and hardly seems to be a glowing advert for the medium. Finally, if you want to bring the man’s politics into play, then have at it – but I’d rather just review the movie in front of me and let it speak for itself.
Unfortunately, Ice Cream Man doesn’t actually have much to say beyond its endless gore gags and one-joke stance, and while certain aspects of the film kept me happily in my seat for the noticably brief runtime, the fact that Roth’s turned in something so vapid and devoid of fresh ideas despite directing feature films as far back as 2002 is a little worrying. Not to say that Roth is a titan among filmmakers, but on the other hand, he’s directed movies with Cate Blanchett in them – twice – so it’s a little strange that his latest serving is not only shamelessly derivative, but oddly amateurish-looking too. It seems that the filmmaker has looked around at the horror landscape and decided that ripping off plot of Weapons and the pantomime atrocities of the Terrifier franchise constitutes as whipping up a fresh idea. Needless to say, there’s a fair bit of Children Of The Corn (not to mention 2014 killer kid comedy, Cooties) in there too as the kill-happy kids wash over a King-ian town at the whims of an overacting pied piper type.
But while Roth peppers the film with plentiful gore gags, lots of overt horror references to such films as The Birds and Day Of The Dead, and a tongue-in-cheek, super-bright colour pallet to give the film the vibrancy of an impossibly hopeful Coca Cola poster from the 50s, the emptiness of the film in general soon creeps in like a chill. It seems that Roth wants to poke some affectionate holes in movies featuring Freddy Krueger style villains who come with complete with overcomplicated origins, a hunger for posthumous revenge and an entire step-by-step rules on how to defeat him. In fact, some of the best jokes the film has involves taking the piss out of trying to walk someone though the ludicrously convoluted process of ending the threat and a flashback that sees the titular villain wearing his ice cream man uniform in court all but confirms that spoofery is afoot.
However, the fact that Roth is in an even far more playful mood than he was during Thanksgiving, doesn’t mean that he gets a pass. The influx of borrowed ideas is bad enough (Temu Weapons is one such fitting accusation), but amidst the endless gore and self-parody, Ice Cream Man forgets to include a single shred of tension and you frequently find yourself not caring about the outcome – even when Roth delivers an appropriately mischevious, down-beat ending. But possibly the worst thing about Ice Cream Man is how openly amateurish it frequently feels. One of the best things about Thanksgiving was precisely how slick it was (that Black Friday opening was stellar), but there are times during this film where you genuinely wouldn’t believe that Roth has been making movies for twenty-four years. While I do feel some of the complaints leveled at this movie seem to come chiefly from a dislike of Roth himself, it’s strange that such as seasoned director with a supposed strong, subversive grasp on the genre, would produce something so childishly basic.
Not as funny or subversive as Roth obviously thinks it is, Ice Cream Man still has some moments worth chuckling at. However, despite the feeling that this film would probably play far better if you were drunk and stoned with your mates as it plays in the background, Ice Cream Man is far too flat and derivative to appease the sweet tooth of horror fans.
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Ghost of Chas. Balun say “Eli Roth blows dead goats in hell.”