‘Ice Cream Man’ Review: Eli Roth's Latest is a Sweet Tooth That Needs to be Pulled
Eli Roth’s name being attached to ‘Ice Cream Man’ will be enough to grab the attention of many horror fans. His work on the likes of Hostel and Thanksgiving (among much, much else) has developed him a name on the grittier, gorier side of the horror/slasher scene. Even as critics most often fail to connect with his work, Roth’s diehard fans have long jumped in front of the sword to defend him.
However, with Ice Cream Man, Roth has lost even his most ardent contingent. Where Thanksgiving was somewhat self-aware and mysterious, Ice Cream Man is oblivious and narratively discombobulated. Not only has Roth lost his step on the page, but his shameless use of generative AI for numerous sequences in the film make it appear immediately dated, as well as outright disrespectful.
Ice Cream Man is a horror movie that spits in the face of a genre that’s already arguably reeling. I’d take 100 subpar Conjuring sequels before we get another loosely themed, AI-heavy slasher like this one from Roth. It’s underbaked in every sense of the word, and any and every self-respecting horror fan out there would be better off looking anywhere else but here for new digs.
The film follows three, sometimes four kids who race to defeat the oh-so-evil Ice Cream Man as he quickly infects the rest of the children in their suburban town with his confectionaries. There are a few mild twists in the story to remind you that this was (allegedly) written by someone, but Ice Cream Man is more an engine for its spooks and scares than anything else.
Roth’s stories have never been a particular focus, but here, everything goes out the window to make room for ice cream-related kills and, sometimes, plain ol’ kills. Now and again it will become clear that Roth came into this thing with an idea for a sequence, and those few scenes stand out as relevant to the concept and unique to this picture, at least.
But even at its most unique, Ice Cream Man is nothing that you haven’t seen before. The camera remains almost eerily still, and when it does move, you’d be lucky to get a real sequence that wasn’t bought, paid for, and generated within some lifeless digital system. Anything beyond the basic boundaries of shot/reverse shot filmmaking is at risk of being entirely faked here. You’ll be on your AI-detecting toes the entire way through.
And this writer is not trying to go full “old man yells at cloud” here, but it’s painfully apparent that Roth opts for AI every time Ice Cream Man even has a chance to get interesting, and it renders the film shallow and hollow. What you’re left with, then, plays like a trial run for AI implementation on the big screen. It has never worked prior to this film, and again, the Chasmic uncanny valley between actually trying to make a movie and letting your computer make one for you remains uncrossable. Ice Cream Man plummets down that pit, and if you get any joy from this experience, it’ll likely be limited to watching it fall.
Not even the cast of kiddos manage to bring any charm to this melted cone. That’s not to say that the actors are bad, but they’re written about 10 years above their age. Roth’s crude taste in dialogue does nothing to ground his cast in any sense of realism or relatability; they’re simply engines for his overwrought carnage, and in a movie that betrays the very art that it’s plainly trying to imitate, even those violent inspirations fall flat. There’s just nothing at all to take away from this one.
Roth has long been known to wear his contemporaries on his sleeve; time and time again, even his best work has shone proud shades of the horror legends that came before him. That isn’t always a bad thing - Thanksgiving’s Halloween-like opener being probably the best recent example - but it doesn’t work when you’re making a movie that the minds behind the classics would almost certainly detest.
Ice Cream Man is irredeemable in form and function. It may be slightly different if the AI inclusions here were interrupting a decent movie otherwise, but the fact that they fit right into the rest of this whimpering mess is all you need to know about the final product. It could be argued as the worst horror movie ever widely put to screen, and any fans of the genre - or of the cinematic art in general - should avoid it at all costs. Ice Cream Man is to the soul as the entire canister of mayonnaise ice cream is to the stomach. I’m not even sure something like that exists, but imagining that it does takes more mental handiwork than engaging with this miserable misfire.