A week or so before Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man came out, my feed was inundated with videos of Gen Z YouTubers (none of whom I follow, mind you) holding tiny microphones and aggressively clutching their pearls as they condemned the film for having the audacity to (checks notes)… contain politically incorrect humor? They were also shocked (SHOCKED! I tell you!) by the extreme gore, mostly done by zombified children. It’s almost as if none of these bozos had ever seen The Children, Who Can Kill a Child?, or Cooties.
Well, forget those weenies. I’m here to tell you Ice Cream Man is another bonafide classic from Roth. It’s a fun, gory, and mean-spirited romp that plays like a Troma movie on steroids. It’s a lot better than that Weapons crap, I’ll tell you that.
The plot has a creepy ice cream man (Ari Millen) coming into a small town and handing out ice cream to all the kids. Before long, the ice cream turns the children into kill-crazy brats that brutally murder all the adults in town. It’s then up to the last surviving normal kids to stop the ice cream man’s reign of terror.
Like most of Roth’s work, the film is full of black humor, gory goodness, and scenes of awful people getting their just desserts. (I’m allowing myself only one ice cream pun in this review.) Some of the juicy highlights include the kids using an ice cream scoop to dole out their principal’s brains, turning a teacher into a human version of the Operation board game, and a standout death involving a microscope. While the flick coasts on the copious gore, Roth (who is also hilarious as the father of our hero, who makes an unending stream of dad jokes) also delivers a few well-edited sequences, my favorite being a terrific nod to The Birds. I also got a kick out of the scene where a priest tells our heroes the overly complicated way the title character must be dispatched, which plays like a parody of the cheesy lore usually found in horror films.
However, the best part was the attached preview for Roth’s next film, a collaboration with Snoop Dogg called Don’t Go in That House, Bitch! that ranks right up there with his original Thanksgiving trailer.
If Ice Cream Man has a flaw, it’s that it might not be as polished as Thanksgiving (the movie, not the trailer). Time will only tell if it has the replay value of Roth’s Green Inferno or Cabin Fever. I guess when you’re the 21st century GOAT of horror, your only competition is yourself.
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