RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 5 sourcesInsofar as commentary is a reason anyone watches an Eli Roth movie, Ice Cream Man has less on its mind than the director’s previous and more successful splatter exercise, Thanksgiving . Where that film paid belligerent lip service to the obscene pageantry of American self-satisfaction, Ice Cream Man narrows its focus—if “focus” is the word to use here—to something at once familiar and more diffuse: The experience of growing up in small-town America, where the menace of bullies is eclipsed by a smiling ice cream vendor ( Undertone ’s Ari Millen) whose creamy confections transform children into vindictive murder-zombies with sugary goop smeared across their faces, often with sprinkles.
The homicidal frozen-treats vendor is hardly a novel premise. Clint Howard terrorized a provincial community in 1995’s Ice Cream Man , and though that film’s body count is microscopic compared to the carnage Roth serves up here, it at least had Howard’s twitchy, unforgettable mug leering at his unsuspecting customers as a creepy comic draw. Millen, by contrast, cuts a more nebulous figure. But through him, Roth concocts what may be his most ridiculous and nauseating series of atrocities to date, a parade of candy barbarism that bludgeons its dramatic purpose into sticky paste. But then, what else do we watch Eli Roth movies for?
With a screenplay co-written by Noah Belson (who also worked with Roth on those perversely great animated shorts The Rotten Fruit ), Ice Cream Man takes us to the idyllic town of Bayleen Bay, where we meet Jared “Jar-Head” Mayfair (Charlie Zeltzer), a reasonably bright but noodle-armed kid who spends most of his life catching hell from local bullies. He gets along better with his older sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), one of the few characters afforded even a smidge of interiority. She’s blowing off the last days of school to party with friends before their father (Roth) makes her intern at the family law firm, which becomes narratively important later on. As a vicious riff on rose-tinted summertime odysseys like The Sandlot —Jared accidentally botches a Little League game early on— Ice Cream Man fleetingly taps into a similarly sweet energy thanks to Zeltzer and Abbott’s natural comic timing and endearing chemistry.
The leads’ strengths contrast wildly with the empty archetypes shuffling around them, such as Lizzie’s douchy boyfriend (Ric Reid), whose chief contribution to the proceedings is a working truck, and the conga line of anonymous grown-ups who later blunder into the slaughter. Faring slightly better are fellow students in Jared’s orbit, like precocious Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and prim, popular Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), both of whom, like Jared, evade the ice cream man’s brainwashing desserts for reasons that range from lactose intolerance and simply not eating the stuff to, most cynically, bulimia.
That’s about it for establishing a habitable community. But at least Roth doesn’t waste time thinning it out, putting ordinary household objects in the hands of the ice cream man’s possessed customers like a legion of demonic Kevin McCallisters roused from sleep (with shades of Zack Cregger’s Weapons ) to wreak havoc. Much of the fun is watching Roth and his effects teams—Applied Arts FX Studio and Marat FX, whose prosthetics are among his greatest assets—execute practical gags using aggressively mundane tools. Fire hydrants smash faces into gazpacho. One bit features a switchblade hidden in an ice cream scoop, which feels like cheating, but the gag’s payoff is so wild it beggars belief. Another sees a poor sap lit on fire, bellowing as he goes up, “The kids have gone fuckin’ crazy!” No one should accuse Ice Cream Man of pretending to be anything beyond what it is: a delivery system for cheap splatter thrills and, for a while, a pretty efficient one.
This creative zeal eventually sputters out. Thanksgiving used inventive variations on its gimmick to build toward its sicko smorgasbord finale, an escalation of gnarly ingenuity that Ice Cream Man lacks. After the initial burst of mayhem in the first act, the movie settles into a repetitive survival yarn that almost resembles a Gen-Alpha Goonies production of George Romero’s Dead films, with Millen’s mustachioed villain functioning as the sinister Pied Piper for his cherubic kill squad. But the ice cream man’s motives and the scheme that sics the children on the adults never develop beyond the hand-waving idea of generational revenge that the surrounding butchery is built on.
This leaves the film feeling like a mash-up of Roth’s enduring obsessions: in-camera gore effects, hostile satire, and a fascination with bodies subjected to elaborate indignities. Yet, like any purveyor of empty-calorie horror, Roth remembers to top his cone with a twist, which turns Ice Cream Man into his most ruthlessly bleak work to date. Late in the game, he introduces a possible solution to the mayhem so ridiculously convoluted that, appropriately enough, only a child would buy it, ending the movie on an aggressively sour note meant to roil the stomach. With a smirk and a wink, he serves up what may well be this summer’s most determinedly feel-bad movie, cackling as he leaves us savoring the viscous aftertaste.
Director: Eli Roth
Writers: Eli Roth, Noah Belson
Starring: Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Sarah Abbott, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Eli Roth
Release date: August 7, 2026
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