ICE CREAM MAN (1995) *

Did you ever watch a movie that is totally stacked with actors and actresses you’re a big fan of and somehow NONE OF IT WORKS?  A movie that has a premise that sounds like it can’t miss and then it does?  Do they have a name for this phenomenon?  If not, may I suggest they call it Ice Cream Man Syndrome.  

Here is a movie with an unbeatable premise:  Clint Howard is a crazy ice cream man who kills people and then puts them into his famous ice cream.  What could go wrong?  Everything apparently.  

One of the many, many, flaws in this flick is that Howard starts at 11 and there’s nowhere to go.  What kid in their right mind would buy ice cream from a bug-eyed creep with a scary voice who sells a very questionable product that has visible eyeballs in it?  His schtick is paper-thin in the beginning and it gets more grating the longer the movie goes on.  It would be one thing if he had some funny one-liners to at least soften the blow of all this nonsense, but lines like, “You’re ice cream!” and “Are you having a bad day?” are more puzzling than anything.  It might’ve worked if the kills were creative.  However, his big trick seems to be just sticking severed heads on an oversized waffle cone.  When he runs out of cones, he puts the heads on popsicle sticks and does puppet shows with them…?  I dunno.  I exhaled more bewildered exhausted sighs during this movie than any in recent memory.

On paper, this should’ve been a bull’s eye.  The ‘90s were a great time for thrillers where people in seemingly harmless jobs snap and go on a murder spree.  Ice Cream Man certainly fits that description, but it’s halfheartedly put together, with too many moving parts, subplots, unnecessary characters, flashbacks, and God knows what else that it often strays from its central premise.

I was very tempted to give it a No Star review because it is one of the most tedious things I’ve sat through in some time.  The reason it skates by with One Star is for the cast alone.  In addition to Howard, we have the American Werewolf himself, David Naughton as a philandering husband, Conan’s Sandahl Bergman as his suffering wife, David Warner as a priest, Lee Majors… II, and porn star Tori Welles.  

Special attention must be paid to Jan-Michael Vincent’s performance as a cop.  I know he was struggling with the bottle at the time, and I have no wish to slam somebody who was clearly having addiction issues… but… WOW.  Then there is The People’s Court’s Doug Llewelyn as a grocery store manager who gets the only good line in the movie when he asks a patron, “Are you going to take it to court?”  Then, of course I remember a world-class fox like Olivia Hussey is in it, and the filmmakers do her the great disservice of dressing her up like a senile old lady and I start to get pissed off all over again.  

I’m saving the best for last though.  Do you know who else is in this movie?  STEVE GARVEY!  The Los Angeles Dodgers legend made this the year as his immortal turn in Bloodfist 6:  Ground Zero, and I’m sure the experience of being thoroughly wasted in a nothing role of one of the kid’s boring parents soured him on acting in future film projects.  

I guess I could probably put a lot of blame on the script for the Ice Cream Man’s problems but seeing how it was co-written by David Dobkin who would go on to direct Wedding Crashers, it’s fair to say his original vision was sullied somewhere during production.  Therefore, I think we got to point the finger at director Paul Norman (who was married to Welles at the time).  Norman directed over a hundred porno movies in his time, and this was the only “legitimate” feature under his belt.  You would’ve thought that because of his background in porn he would forget about the plot and get right to the action, but this one is all plot.  After this did nothing for his career, he went back to doing what he knew best, making such classics as Cry Babies Pt. 1:  Anal Scream, Bitches in Heat Pt. 1:  Locked in the Basement, and Bi and Beyond Pt. 6:  Authentic.