There’s some alternate universe out there where Eli Roth is best known as the creator and showrunner of the cartoon Massholes, his fresh-out-of-school attempt to bring a King of the Hill to the Northeast. In our world, it nearly aired as Chowdaheads, a series of short sketches during WCW Nitro, but that plan went out the window and the shorts remained unseen by the general public until 2016. Yet if you look close enough at some of Roth’s recent work, you can make out its shape and tone, the line between “comedy” and “horror” being something Roth always straddled. Without the kills, Thanksgiving is a “Black Friday sucks” holiday episode, and his latest, the microbudget splatter-fest Ice Cream Man, is a bottle episode about the show’s Bobby Hill equivalent. The first 20 minutes or so are gore-free, establishing the film’s small-town setting through a mild, though not half-bad, Bad News Bears riff. It highlights his skill directing young actors (which recalls The House with a Clock in Its Walls) and his ability to riff off of their quirks — a flubbed line about “Mint Romney” becomes the film’s best joke, whereas other directors might have left it on the cutting room floor. If family audiences still went out to see films about real people, Roth could have made some fun Meatballs sequels or something.
Instead, he’s stalled out, with the downward spiral towards a crash-landing in the horror genre continuing, the engine having taken a direct thunderbolt from that dumb Borderlands movie. Neither a remake of the ’95 slasher with Clint Howard nor an adaptation of W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo’s fantastic comic book series,* Roth’s Ice Cream Man is a garbage plate of mismatched details from better films, only without the fun and camaraderie of a backyard barbecue. It feels listless, but that’s the problem with being a provocateur tilting at the windmills that got Fox News coverage back when Bear Stearns was still solvent — at some point, even the strongest spices can become bland. Our shock-value tolerance is honestly just too high for this to really be exciting anymore.
Roth builds his narrative on a Pied Piper base: a mysterious Ice Cream Man comes to town, serving up treats and hypnotic cartoons to his soon-to-be minions. His backstory is roughly Freddy Krueger’s (as played by Jackie Earle Haley), though we don’t get to hear much from the man himself. He just gets to smile and occasionally glower while exacting his vengeance upon the unsuspecting denizens of this small Maine community. Such payback looks a lot like an inversion of Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad or the last few minutes of Weapons more than any of the other “creepy kid” movies of the last decade or so. Our kid hero is, amusingly, spared misery due to his lactose intolerance — his buddies on the little league team aren’t so lucky. Will he and some other plucky kids stop the Ice Cream Man in time to save their parents?
The answer is less straightforward than you might think, and the ending highlights Roth’s ethos, as outlined in a piece in Indiewire: He wants this to be what horror-nerd kids turn to when they want to watch something behind their parents’ backs. Having failed to do that with Clock, he’s settled on mixing the Real Thing with the aesthetics of low-fi kids’ entertainment like Robert Rodriguez’s features. He knows you’ve seen a few hundred simulated decapitations in your day, but this is some 11-year-old’s first time, and he wants to be the one to hook ‘em on horror. The problem, as he outlines, is that the kids have “Art the Clown backpacks,” much less the never-ending misery machine sitting in their pockets. As such, it can’t be properly dangerous in the way that Hostel was for a generation of millennials and millennial-cuspers, even if the gore is just about the same (if not a little more explicit).
This dish is made all the less appetizing by the worst of all condiments: AI imagery.** Seriously, it’s aggressively frustrating to see the Late Night with the Devil crew get dragged to hell and back because of a few title cards while this will escape notice only because no one’s going to see the damn thing. One could at least ignore it there; here, it’s one of the main reasons behind the film’s existence, shepherded into the world in part by an AI-native production company and its effects arm. Yet that only demonstrates the listlessness that defines the film, going through the motions, choosing what’s easy rather than fun. This isn’t to denigrate the practical VFX work done here, either — there’s some gross shit, of course, like a principal getting served a waffle cone filled with his own freshly-scooped brains — but it feels like sour whipped cream on top of an otherwise forgettable sundae.
Yet, outside of the paying audience member, I don’t think Ice Cream Man was a waste of time for those involved. While writing this and re-reading that Indiewire piece, it struck me why Meatballs, of all things, was the thing Roth would be good at directing should he get away from horror — this would be absolutely fantastic to see at the end of a film school summer camp, and it feels like Roth ran his set like one. You can sense his enthusiasm and delight at working with a mass of unruly kid extras, and it seems like they all had a really fun time making the feature. If he were to transfer that kind of energy to the screen, as he does in a few stray moments before reverting to “horror,” Roth might have something else in his toolbox. It may not be the kind of thing that attracts mainstream attention, but it might be something, I don’t know, good? Memorable? In touch with that different path he could have taken? Either way, it wouldn’t be Ice Cream Man, and that’d be a net improvement.
* Seriously, that Ice Cream Man is one of the most fucked-up and… moving(?!) comics released in the last decade, so please go check it out.
** Roth initially denied it, but has admitted to using generative AI for “a very small portion of a few sequences in the film.” It’s not that subtle; you can pretty easily tell which scenes use it.