by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $6.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O'Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Sarah Abbott, Benjamin Byron Davis, Eli Roth
Intro:
… a genuinely contemptuous film.
It feels like only yesterday we were all having a chinwag about Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002), his impressive albeit wobbly debut film and bold announcement of himself as an up-and-coming horrormeister. That was followed by the one-two punch of Hostel (2005) and Hostel: Part II (2007) and while those flicks have their critics, it’s hard to deny their efficacy and the genuine sense of giddy dread they impart. After that, however, things got a little shonky. Yes, Roth knocked up the very entertaining Thanksgiving trailer for Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s underrated Grindhouse (2007) project, but he also inflicted 2013’s woeful The Green Inferno on the world and then followed that up with 2015’s Knock Knock, a film that couldn’t even be saved by Keanu Reeves and a naked Ana de Armas! After that, things sort of went back and forth, with 2023’s Thanksgiving being a high(ish) point and 2024’s Borderlands being a box office-tanking low. So now, in 2026, we have a new Eli Roth film. This time around, he returns to his beloved genre: dopey, gory horror comedy. Presented in the form of Ice Cream Man. So, how does this new sugary treat taste?
Really bad. Shockingly so.
Set in a small idyllic town full of wholesome families, Ice Cream Man is the story of young tacker Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), a frequently bullied lad who is also lactose intolerant. This latter detail becomes important to the plot because when a mysterious Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) serves delicious, strangely named treats to the local moppets he, and a few others, have to miss out. This proves to be a good thing as those rugrats who sampled the saccharine comestibles become dead-eyed, emotionless murder-zombies who take savage delight in killing all the adults in creatively gory (albeit not particularly convincing) ways. And that’s the premise. And pretty much the entire story for most of the film’s somehow too-long 86-minute runtime. There’s a nasty little twist in the tail of the piece that gestures towards a better version of this material but sadly it’s far too little, far too late.
So, look, no critic worth their salt likes to slag off films. Particularly horror films that come from creatives whose work they’ve liked before. However, it needs to be said, Ice Cream Man is a shockingly inept movie. After a perfectly serviceable opening 15(ish) minutes, the film launches into the gory shenanigans and the wheels immediately fall off. The gore is garish, overlit, poorly executed and frequently too silly to be effective and too dull-witted to be funny. It’s also near constant for the entire second act which has the effect of deadening the senses, a cornucopia of atrocity delivered with the skill of a work experience kid after he’s hoofed a sack full of nangs. You would think a bloke being served his own scooped out brains in an ice cream cone would be a triumph of gleeful splatter that rivals the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis but instead it comes off like a scrapped Troma gag consigned to the deleted scenes of a DVD that no one bought.
It also doesn’t help that the cast aren’t great either, with Eli Roth and Noah Belson’s clunky, self-conscious dialogue poorly delivered by people who look like they’d rather be almost anywhere else. There are numerous takes that had your humble scribe sitting back in his seat, gaping, wondering “if that was the take they kept, what were the rest of them like?” Mind you, it’s possible that not even Meryl Streep could breathe life into a clanger like “I’m a 12-year-old girl, of course I know how to make myself throw up.” So, ropey gore, tedious script and bad acting – what else does Ice Cream Man have to offer? Well, there are also some pretty half-arsed AI sequences throughout and one set piece “inspired” by Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds that is either AI augmented or genuinely some of the worst CGI seen in a Hollywood movie in recent memory.
It gives us no pleasure to say these words, but Ice Cream Man is a stinker. Hell, it makes the 1995 Clint Howard starrer of the same name seem like Weapons by comparison. Eli Roth has made good films before, he’s made bad films before, but this feels like the first time he’s made a genuinely contemptuous film. When it comes to Ice Cream Man, we’re all lactose intolerant: because this film is going to give everyone the shits.
