The Ice Cream Man leaves you with a brain freeze

Ice Cream Man by longtime horror mainstay Eli Roth has finally hit theaters after his last successful venture back into directing with Thanksgiving. This film follows the residents of Bayleen Bay, an idyllic town of happy go lucky summer enjoyers. When a new ice cream truck rolls through with wild success, the children who eat it soon find themselves maddened and controlled by the Ice Cream Man. Engaging in a litany of gruesome murders, the children quickly cause pandemonium in the town, leaving its fate resting on the shoulders of the few you didn't indulge in the dairy delicacy.

Eli Roth is a legend in the horror space. Cutting his teeth with cult classic like Cabin Fever over 20 years ago, he has been a mainstay and more recently has positioned himself back in the director's chair. He roared back with Thanksgiving which was pretty universally enjoyed, a film he said he has been stewing on for decades wanting to create.

I'll start with a disclaimer. Ice Cream Man has dominated the horror news cycles for the use of AI in the film, and while I agree with the premise of this being an issue, I am going to steer clear from wading in those waters and try my best to discuss the film itself without venting about the use of artificial intelligence. Ultimately, I resonate with a lot of the complaints I see about this film. It really lacks a substantive plot, it becomes a smorgasbord of gruesome kills and gore and while I generally can enjoy that, the kills never really feel earned. The situations seem specifically set up around the kills rather than the kills happening because of the situations. While the kills start out really fun and exciting, they can quickly get redundant as the film moves along. The Ice Cream Man himself was neat, well-designed and creepy and I appreciated his lack of dialogue throughout which reinforced his scary intrigue.

The characters were largely an afterthought and the lore and background was given in giant exposition dumps and included characters and storylines we had hardly heard about. It seemed clear that while Thanksgiving was a meticulous process that had been working around his head for years, Ice Cream Man was more of a spur of the moment fun idea that ended up feeling more like a Simpson's Halloween Special with added gore, than it did a fully realized horror film.

Ultimately, this felt like an issue of too many almosts for Roth. He wanted this film to be campy and funny but it never fully waded into that territory, often losing the tone trying to switch back and forth. He also wanted the kills to be absolutely brutal and plentiful, which they were but the campy undertone really cheapened the terror of them. He wanted everything to look dated and 80's-centric, and while parts were, it sometimes felt like he gave up on fully trying to get it there, adding in filters or AI or CGI. Even the concept itself felt like something he had an excellent idea about that had been bouncing around but instead of trying to fully flesh it out, he just right to work making it, leaving it feeling extremely half-baked. While some of the negative attention had bled from the AI debate into the quality of this film itself, it never feels fully complete and doesn't have that Eli Roth charm that usually accompanies his work. However, if you love gore and splatter, Ice Cream Man may still give you an enjoyable experience. You can see it in theaters today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuKUMxvwyeM