Cert – 18, Run-time – 1 hour 26 minutes, Director – Eli Roth
When a mysterious ice cream man (Ari Millen) arrives in a quiet town, overnight the kids turn to kill all the adults in the area.
As children race around, screaming and giggling as they disembowel one of their teachers beneath the jungle gym I sat truly confused as to whether Eli Roth wanted me to find the grisly 18-certificate images on screen funny. He seems to find amusement himself in the sight of children possessed by evil ice cream caving in a face to the point where it more resembles jam, or perhaps in this case strawberry sauce, but the degree of the violence and rough CG imagery contradicts this with suggestions that there should be a darker impact.
The idea of Ice Cream Man feels at home with cheap yet enjoyable 80s slashers such as Chopping Mall, a mysterious ice cream van (driven by Ari Millen’s silent titular figure) turns up one day in a sleepy town, seemingly with enough supply to cater to the entire child population and some adults, and overnight the children wake up and start to kill the adults. It’s up to young, lactose intolerant Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) and fellow pupils Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) – whose reasoning for not being possessed is unfortunately “I’m a 12-year-old girl, of course I know how to make myself throw up” – and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) to find out what’s happening and try and break the curse before they, too, get turned.
There’s territory for a dark, twisted film with the children performing the killings, but Roth consistently feels as if he’s trying to create a laugh that he’s in on but not the audience. Cue a succession of kills followed by another succession of clues a few feet away followed by even more just down the road, after extended sight of the normal everyday the narrative soon stretches into a set of attack sequences where each kill is too brief to actually have an effect, simply moving on to the next as quickly as possible to show off a new idea. The focus for Roth’s screenplay appears to have been how he can push things and what potentially shocking or ridiculous way he can create bloodshed next.
It all becomes quite bland quite quickly, almost as uninspired as the AI images cropping up throughout, particularly in cartoons with a jingle that seems to hypnotise the children the day before they turn. A tonally jumbled cycle that never feels certain as to whether the audience is meant to find humour in the gore or not. Mix in bursts of on-the-nose dialogue in one of the years clunkiest scripts and the whole thing starts to feel like an exercise in clumping a story around a succession of bodies, where even the director’s amusement starts to feel uncertain.
Focused on a succession of tonally confusing kills, joined by some truly basic dialogue, Ice Cream Man’s a cold, flavourless 86-minutes that feels like an inside joke exclusively for its director.
Just A Little Bit Random 