Ice Cream Man

Back in the 2000s, self-styled provocateur Eli Roth rode the foaming crest of the torture porn wave. Gratuitous, guts-out exploitation throwbacks, Cabin Fever and Hostel weren’t so much transgressive horrors as can-you-stomach-it endurance tests tooled up to outrage.

After some stumbling missteps outside the genre, killer kids horror Ice Cream Man marks a return to Roth’s patented shock bait, albeit with a fatal tonal shift. This time he’s playing the splatter for laughs, and the yuks dry out fast. 

Welcome, then, to Bayleen Bay, a sunny Spielbergian suburban idyll invaded by a tinkling ice cream van. Kids being kids, they swarm the truck, but there’s something off about the perma-grinning vendor and his demonic Serpent Swirl soft scoop. In one slurp, the kids gets possessed and froth into a murderous rampage. Resisting the lure is Charlie Zeltzer’s lactose-intolerant misfit, who along with his high-school crush (Kiori Mirza Waldman), form a Stephen King-style gang of resistance against the marauding sprogs. 

Eventually, the lore gets over-explained by a priest in a clumsy exposition dump but the plot is emptier than a ghost’s stomach. Not that Roth seems overly bothered. He’s only here for the shock and gore. We get death by shears and scooping lobotomies, impalement by maraca, bodies pulped by see-saws and entrails used as a skipping rope. There’s so much viscera flying around it’s like watching a surgeon’s food fight. 

There’s so much viscera flying around it’s like watching a surgeon’s food fight

Roth credits Terrifier for refreshing his appetite for ‘no limits’ horror and Ari Millen’s mute Ice Cream Man is pretty much Art the Clown in a ’50s soda jerk costume. But unlike Terrifier, he doesn’t feel dangerous or even a threat, and there’s not a drip of jeopardy in its 86 minutes. 

It doesn’t help Ice Cream Man is lit like a Hallmark movie. The refulgent colour grading might make the blood pop but a horror movie without shadow is also horror without fear. When its title card announces ‘Filmed In Scream-o-vision’, you get the impression Roth is aiming at a stylistic revival of the bad-taste VHS B-horror but the uncertain tone never fully commits. Are we watching a parody of excess? Or a nostalgic throwback? Larry Cohen’s junk-food horror The Stuff, whose addictive gloopy dessert turned its consumers into zombies and is clearly an influence here, did this so much better, and with a sharper wit. 

You can’t question Roth’s fanboy love of the genre and gorehounds will lap up the gnarly practical FX. But once the novelty deaths wear thin, the carnage leaves you with a numbing brain-freeze. Go for the gore, but chilling it isn’t. 

In cinemas worldwide Aug 7