Filmmaker Eli Roth has always been a mixed bag for me. I found the body horrors utterly disturbing in his feature debut, CABIN FEVER, but recoiled from the numbing brutality of his HOSTEL films. I appreciated the nuance he brought to THE GREEN INFERNO, then scoffed at the one-note bluntness of his DEATH WISH remake. And while his fake THANKSGIVING trailer made me laugh harder than most comedies, the feature it spawned fell into the very slasher clichés his two-minute spoof had so brilliantly lampooned between the GRINDHOUSE segments.
Now Roth has brought us ICE CREAM MAN, a film that seems to want to be both parody and chiller but never settles comfortably into either mode. Its premise has children zombified into a murderous rampage by a sinister ice cream man, yet the movie barely develops beyond that elevator pitch. The title character is a smiling, silent vendor (Ari Millen) who drives his cheery truck around town, handing out tainted treats to unsuspecting kids. Soon after eating them, they turn into maniacs, slaughtering any adult in their path — parents, teachers, and local business owners alike.
Some of the kills are merely grotesque, including hacksaw beheadings and electric toothbrushes jammed into ear canals. Others are more inventive, turning schoolyard and classroom props — paper cutters, tetherball cords, science-class microscopes — into weapons. Three kids, led by nerdy hero Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), skip the ice cream and become the amateur sleuths trying to figure out what is happening. Is it demonic possession? Lactose intolerance? Something else entirely? Unfortunately, the eventual revelation is a downer, draining much of the fun with an explanation that never convinces.
Roth toys with tropes and pop-culture references ranging from the Pied Piper to Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS to Zach Cregger’s WEAPONS, while the town’s oversaturated Americana may remind viewers of David Lynch’s BLUE VELVET. But Roth misses a real opportunity to say something sharper about children as acceptable collateral damage in the modern world, from Columbine to Gaza. What remains is mostly bloodletting, with little weight behind it. It could’ve been a revenge fantasy; instead, it plays out as just psycho kids being brainwashed by the Ice Cream Man and his truck of dangerous novelties.
It’s a shame Roth seems content here to be little more than gross and silly. He does appear in the film as a lawyer, and he gives a very good performance, but at this point in his career, he should be stretching further as a filmmaker — or at least risking a sharper statement. Why aren’t he and co-writer Noah Belson using the genre to say more about our troubled times instead of simply satirizing horror itself?
Much of it is vicious, some of it is funny, but in the end, ICE CREAM MAN still tastes like empty calories.
