If you had asked me 20 years ago, “Hey, guy who will at some point in the future be known as Wolfman, do you like Eli Roth?” then my answer probably would have been, “Hell yeah! Cabin Fever?! Hostel?! Those movies rock! Also, I have my whole life ahead of me, surely I won’t waste it writing about horror movies online!” Then, unfortunately, came Hostel Part II and The Green Inferno and Knock Knock and, well, you get the point. Despite delivering one dud after another, I was at least mildly entertained by Thanksgiving, so, hey, maybe Ice Cream Man had the potential to also be good! Having now seen the movie, though, Roth maybe should have replicated his Thanksgiving formula and just given us a trailer for this movie and then spent a couple of decades trying to justify why it should be a movie. There’s goofy gore and a few funny visuals, but the story quickly runs out of steam.

Summer is about to kick off in a small coastal town, which means baseball games, childish tomfoolery, and the arrival of ice cream trucks. One truck is driven by a man no one has ever seen before (Ari Millen) with treats that customers can’t get enough of. The next day, everyone who ate the ice cream is demonstrating bizarre behavior; namely, they are little kids who are killing adults in grotesque and violent ways. Those who didn’t eat the delicious dessert must band together to figure out what’s going on to everyone and how to stop it, and somehow avoid eating ice cream in the summer.

If you’re thinking that this plot sounds razor-thin and you’re wondering how it can sustain itself for 90 minutes, well, I agree, I also wonder how this movie lasted for 90 minutes. The movies that helped launch Roth’s career delivered brutal violence and a satirical sense of humor, which is a tone that Ice Cream Man somewhat attempts. In those first 30 minutes, we just see kids being kids as they ride bikes, make TikToks, and bully each other. When they start killing adults in a whirlwind of terror, they celebrate by doing Fortnite dances, resulting in multiple funny moments of juxtaposition between the on-screen violence and these kids’ behavior. However, once you realize you have a whole hour left, your general support of the endeavor dissipates.

Roth has said in promotion of this movie that he was emboldened to make Ice Cream Man by the success of the Terrifier franchise, as audiences were proving that they were willing to turn up in droves to see heinously violent movies on the big screen. Luckily, Ice Cream Man is technically a much better picture than every single Terrifier movie, if only due to Roth’s decades of experience of making movies. If all you’re looking for in this movie is wildly violent sequences involving creepy kids, then it fully delivers, as most of these sequences feel like Itchy and Scratchy segments brought to life. I won’t detail the specifics of these scenes, though I can assure you they are outrageous and aplenty. Like Terrifier, there’s an attempt at finding a new horror mascot in the Ice Cream Man himself, yet by only allowing Millen to silently and exaggeratedly emote, the character is ultimately unmemorable.

Once you lose enthusiasm for the visuals of young kids unleashing wild violence, the movie attempts to deliver some sort of explanation for the nightmare that’s unfolding, which ultimately just borrows elements of other, better stories. It feels like a mashup of the Pied Piper and A Nightmare on Elm Street, so if those stories particularly appeal to you, then Ice Cream Man might be more up your alley. As far as how to stop this reign of terror, we get a complex and convoluted explanation, and while it’s even addressed in the movie how overly complex the lore is, these reveals resulted in me giving up on the narrative entirely. It’s clear that the visuals were the main inspiration for making this movie, and the attempt to create a narrative to justify those visuals feels like an afterthought.

Based on the look of the movie, its premise, and the performances, it feels like a feature-length R-rated episode of the Goosebumps TV show. The problem, though, is that those stories were capped at 22 minutes, and even two-part outings only lasted 44 minutes. Trying to turn this entirely one-dimensional concept into an entire movie was an impossible task that likely never could have worked. While it is clearly intentionally borrowing elements from things like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, The Birds, and some of the other aforementioned movies, it never comes close to equaling the merits of any of its influences. The result feels like taking the last five minutes of Weapons and stretching it out into 90 minutes; there’s a reason Zach Cregger made a horror movie that was only punctuated by juvenile chaos as opposed to attempting to maintain that tone for an entire movie. Roth devotees will likely appreciate the straightforward nature of Ice Cream Man, fully delivering on everything the trailer promised, but anyone hoping for more than a gory highlight reel spread way too thin will be left disappointed.

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