ICE CREAM MAN (2026)

In theaters now from the Horror Section!
Directed by Eli Roth.
Written by Eli Roth, Noah Belson.
Check out the trailer here!

A small town turns into the site of a massacre when the Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) and his truck filled with frozen treats rolls through town feeding all the local children treats that make them become bloodthirsty killers. Only a handful of kids who haven’t consumed the tainted treats fight to survive.

Ok. Let me get one thing straight. As a child, I was deathly afraid of the Ice Cream Man. Not because he was scary, but I would shriek at the top of my lungs when that tune would come on and the truck would approach because of the pressure I felt that I might miss getting something frosty as it passed by. I remember this day being overwhelmed with fear. It was paralyzing and if we missed the ice cream truck, I was sure to weep and scream because we missed it. Yes. I was a special child. So, hearing that tune, which brings so much joy to kids around the world, only fills me with crippling anxiety to this day.

Not one to shy away from my fears, I did see ICE CREAM MAN and feel the movie did what it set out to do. Nauseate. Offend. And yes, occasionally entertain.

Like all of us, Eli Roth saw WEAPONS last year and really dug the final scene where the kids rampage and murder the old lady. But unlike everyone else, Eli Roth thought it would be a good idea to make an entire movie around that scene. ICE CREAM MAN is repetitive. Basically, it’s scene after scene of kids killing adults in grotesque ways. The TERRIFIER crowd has a new film to jizz over, meaning that this is a gore hounds’ delight. But I feel if you don’t like your horror as bloodthirsty, you might not find it entertaining.

The film is a wonderful highlight reel of comical and horrifying ways kids can dissect adults sloppily. The effects are of high quality and while some of them were CG, a surprising amount of it was practical, which I appreciated. I wasn’t grossed out by the gore, so I wasn’t among the audience I saw it with who covered their faces or got up and left. The eighties kid in me was entertained pretty much on a surface level the entire way through.

Eli Roth seems like an eighties kid, and I know he really, really, really wants to be seen as the Tarantino of horror. He’s a film nerd and has decided to keep his sights on the horror genre. This occasionally works out. And there are some parts of gross out mayhem in ICE CREAM MAN that I appreciated. A lot of people are going to rag on Roth for ripping off WEAPONS (as I just did), but it’s not like this is the first film to feature kids going nuts and killing adults. It’s the plot of THE CHILDREN (both the 1980 one and the more recent one released in 2008), CHILDREN OF THE CORN, BLOODY BIRTHDAY, THE DEVIL TIMES FIVE, and more recent films like SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE CHILDREN and COME AND PLAY. So, the fact that Roth made a killer kids movie doesn’t mean he lifted directly from WEAPONS. It just means that producers who can’t see past the nose on their faces saw what a hot WEAPONS commodity was and decided to give the green light to this film.

Still, there’s a lot of clunkiness going on with ICE CREAM MAN. The child actors are…okay. They do their part and are best when they are simply running away from the bloodthirsty kids and not saying too much. When things slow down and the blood trickles away, the kids show their inexperience. They aren’t annoying as much as they just don’t have the emotional range to reach the distance necessary to give convincing performances.

The writing is…sloppy. There is a midway point that screeches to a halt as someone drops an exposition bomb the size of a warhead on the audience. Yes, it seems Roth knows this is bad and kind of makes the whole scene hammy and the way to overcome the Ice Cream Man overly-complex. It seems like Roth was trying to both pay homage and make fun of those old, badly written movies of the eighties, but that doesn’t mean it still isn’t grueling to sit through.

The gore hound in me had fun with ICE CREAM MAN. Ari Millen who plays the titular character is an actor I pointed out for greatness back when he starred in VICIOUS FUN and THE OAK ROOM. I’m glad this talented actor gets the spotlight, but he doesn’t give much here as he doesn’t even speak a line. This is going to be a divisive film. The TERRIFIER crowd are going to dig it. But this is a “not ready for mainstream” movie, for certain. Lower your expectations and you might have some dumb fun. No prudes allowed though.

Oh yeah, about the whole AI thing. Roth claims he used AI in a few scenes of the film. I’m not a fan of AI being used in creative circles, but I am also not the type to start gathering my torches and pitchforks every time the subject of AI comes up. Was the use of AI obvious in ICE CREAM MAN? Not really. Honestly, there are some bad CG shots that I simply wrote off as bad CG. Now, while I know digital effects are a completely different monster than AI, it still is a similar monster and being a fan of practical effects, I’ll prefer to see those effects any old day. Did Roth’s use of AI influence my thoughts on the film? Not really. It wasn’t a knockout even before I heard about all of the controversy. Now that I know about it, it feels more like lazy filmmaking more than anything else.