Ice Cream Man: Eli Roth Gorges on Blood and Sprinkles in Endless Psycho-Child Rampage
By Jim Slotek
Rating: D
You’d think the quick bankrupty of his ill-fated Las Vegas “Goretorium” attraction some years back would have suggested to splatter-king Eli Roth that gory deaths alone don’t, ahem, cut it.
Similarly, his new horror feature Ice Cream Man is blood and guts without a story. It may be only 86 minutes long, but it feels like forever.
The plot barely qualifies as high concept. An ice cream truck rolls into town, driven by a grinning vendor (Ari Millen) with a John Waters moustache, and the children who eat its demonic frozen wares wake up in giggling psycho mode, slicing, dicing and decapitating their parents, before moving on to their neighbours, teachers and first responders.
That’s it. For more than a solid hour without stopping. Every which way life and limb can be separated, via garbage disposals, ignited gasoline, blunt objects, bricks thrown from rooftops, people thrown from rooftops. Brain-eating, the retrieval of raw sausages from people’s bellies standing in for intestines (always cook your sausages before eating them, people!). Well before the 50th severed limb, the slaughter becomes boring beyond redemption.
Explicit slaughter was hot stuff a generation ago when Roth helped kick off the “torture porn” era of splatter films, with Cabin Fever and Hostel (alongside the James Wan-created Saw franchise), which, to be fair, had some thought put into them. We briefly thought a stake had been driven through the genre’s heart when Blumhouse entered the scene with Paranormal Activity and said, “You know what’s really scary? A door opening and closing by itself.”
But here we are, with Roth embracing one of the most scary things that exist – children. The “evil child” has been around a long time (The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Omen, The Exorcist, Children of the Corn), and apparently preys on our subconscious. Here they are covered in blood and sprinkles.
Briefly in the first act, the sun shines on Bayleen Bay, where children apparently do not spend all their time staring at smart phones (although they have them). Instead, they’re playing baseball, skipping rope, etc.
It’s not all smalltown-paradise, however. Life for Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) consists of botching plays in the outfield and dodging bullies. Fortunately for him, he is lactose intolerant, and so is one of the few non-ice cream psychos. His crush Marcella (Carina Battrick) apparently vomited hers up for eating disorder reasons. (Roth himself plays Jared’s dad Marty, a lawyer and generator of bad puns.) Classmate Tommy (Shiloh O'Reilly) has no apparent medical reason for being dispossessed, he just is.
And so, they run, from classroom to classroom, street to street, a church and a graveyard, chauffeured at one point by Jared’s teen sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and her sometime boyfriend Chris (Dylan Hawco).
Of course, eventually, there has to be some explanation for it all. And it comes out, in a torrent of exposition (wouldn’t want to put the gore on hold for too long), from the mouth of a priest in hiding (Benjamin Byron Davis). All I’ll say is there’s necromancy and revenge involved, and Ice Cream Man is sort of an ersatz Freddie Krueger.
The ending, twist and all, is resolved so hurriedly, I suspect it was written after principal photography.
Is this the beginning of a horror franchise? I’ll quote a line from comedian Seán Cullen, who said his favourite charity was, “Stop the Children.”
Ice Cream Man. Directed and co-written by Eli Roth. Starring Charlie Zeltzer, Ari Millen and Carina Battrick. In theatres August 7.