ICE CREAM MAN (2026)

Studio:   The Horror Section
Director: Eli Roth
Writer:   Eli Roth, Noah Belson
Producer: Eli Roth, Kate Harrison Karman, Christopher Woodrow, Raj B. Singh
Stars:    Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Sarah Abbott, Benjamin Byron Davis

Review Score:

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Summary:

An idyllic small town descends into mayhem and murder when mysterious ice cream infects many of the children with madness.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Driving a van that plays a distinctive jingle, a mysterious Ice Cream Man arrives in the picturesque small town of Bayleen Bay. As kids immediately gather for sweet treats, which have unusual names like Locust Lick, Serpent Swirl, and Froggy Swamp Pop, the distraction causes Jared Mayfair to drop a flyball during a Little League game and the opposing team wins. Jared’s best friend Elliott Henderson teases him about the error, but teammate Hank bullies Jared over the loss.

With their coaches Myles and Terry, both teams gather with the other children for ice cream after the game. Jared nearly eats some of the ice cream until his older sister Lizzie reminds him he is lactose intolerant. Lizzie eats the ice cream instead.

Among other things that happen during a stop at Roger’s Hardware Store, Jared and Lizzie have a brief encounter with Lizzie’s dimwitted ex-boyfriend Chris. Jared and other children also receive strange ice cream-related cartoons on their cellphones.

Jared goes to visit Elliott, but Elliott’s mother tells him her son is unexpectedly feeling sick. Upon leaving, Jared has a run-in with another bully, Sebastian, who threatens to steal Jared’s bike. Jared goes home for dinner with Lizzie, their mother Alison, and their father Marty, an attorney who has carried on their family’s legacy of operating a local law firm. Meanwhile, the Ice Cream Man continues driving throughout the neighborhood as children who ate his ice cream become entranced and homicidal throughout Bayleen Bay.

That night, young Piper Farber saws off her mother Fran’s head. Piper’s brother Moog, who hit the game-winning run that Jared dropped, beats their father Barry to death with a baseball bat. Elsewhere, one of the Little League coaches, Myles, is mutilated by his two children while Hank and his sister slit their mother’s throat and burn their father Terry alive.

Elliott’s mother finds her son sawing up his father in their garage. Elliott then kills his mother with gardening shears.

The next morning, Piper Farber murders an elderly woman walking her dog. Marty and Alison Mayfair notice the Ice Cream Man sitting in his van outside their house. A group of children also suffocates and kills a jogger.

On his bike ride to school, Jared observes Moog acting strangely outside his house. At school, Jared sees that all of the kids except his classmates Mia and Jesse are seemingly entranced.

When the ice cream truck arrives, all of the entranced children simultaneously get up and exit schoolteacher Mr. Hamlin’s classroom. Jared follows them outside to find out what is going on. As the Ice Cream Man feeds everyone more ice cream, Jared becomes confused that he can’t communicate with an entranced Elliott. Moog offers a cone to Jared, which he almost eats until Mia knocks it out of his hand.

One of the children collapses. A concerned schoolteacher tries calling for help, but kids on the roof throw down bricks that kill her. The collapsed boy is revived with more ice cream. He and Piper Farber proceed to murder and scoop out the brains of Principal Bob Maloney while the other children cheer.

Jared, Mia, and another unaffected boy, Tommy Green, flee inside the school, where children continue slaughtering schoolteachers. Outside, a police officer and a firefighter arrive separately, and they also become victims of gruesome violence.

Convinced that the Ice Cream Man is behind the murderous mayhem, Jared realizes the other children are trying to transform he, Mia, and Tommy, not kill them. Infected kids disperse throughout town, setting fires and disemboweling more adults.

Partially paralyzed in her bedroom, Lizzie manages to call her brother Jared. Jared reasons that partial paralysis is as much as the ice cream can affect a teenager. Jared instructs his sister to vomit whatever ice cream is left in her stomach and meet him at the church to regroup, which she does. Seeing the chaos throughout town, Lizzie calls for help from her ex Chris, who uses his truck to escort them through the madness.

Jared’s bully Sebastian tries to join the surviving trio of children, but he is caught by a mob and forced to eat ice cream. Jared, Mia, and Tommy flee to the basement of the church where they end up locked inside a walk-in fridge containing the Ice Cream Man’s ice cream supply and a man claiming to be a priest.

Blaming himself for the Ice Cream Man’s terror, the Priest explains that Jonathan Smiley was an ice cream man who spoke with an accent, so everyone presumed he was from a war-torn country. All Smiley supposedly wanted to do was make children happy with ice cream, but the Priest helped coordinate a conspiratorial coverup that blamed him for crimes committed by a pedophile priest. Jared’s grandfather, attorney Milton Mayfair, coerced kids into accusing Smiley of molesting the town’s children, resulting in his imprisonment.

While in jail, a mysterious Necromancer made a deal for Smiley’s soul. The Necromancer promised that when local children had grown into adults and forgotten what they’d done, he would bring back Smiley for revenge. The following day, Smiley was found dead in his cell. However, the Necromancer resurrected him as the Ice Cream Man and took his place in an unmarked grave,

The Priest tells Jared, Mia, and Tommy that they can kill the Ice Cream Man if they destroy the Necromancer. He instructs them to dig up the grave, kill the buried Siren guarding the coffin, and decapitate the Necromancer. Warning that looking at the Necromancer would be deadly, the Priest advises that they must then force the Ice Cream Man to look directly at the Necromancer’s head, which will supposedly kill him.

The Ice Cream Man unlocks the walk-in refrigerator. As they see the Priest seemingly swarmed by infected children, Jared, Mia, and Tommy escape.

Lizzie and Chris find Jared, Mia, and Tommy. After conferring on what is happening, the five of them gather digging supplies and make their way through the ruined town to the cemetery.

Holding hands with a line of children, the Ice Cream Man blocks the road. Chris drives right through the blockade. Chris then offers to continue distracting the Ice Cream Man while everyone else locates and digs up the grave.

Seemingly returned to normal and claiming the ice cream’s effects wore off, Elliott warns Jared that the Ice Cream Man set a trap. Jared concludes Elliott is lying by tricking him into answering incorrectly about their baseball game’s outcome. Possessed children quickly shove ice cream into Mia’s mouth and pull her away.

The children gather around the Ice Cream Man’s van as he arrives at the gravesite. Chris also arrives, and helps Jared, Lizzie, and Tommy finish exhuming the coffin, which contains two bodies wrapped in occult robes bearing the same symbols that advertise the ice cream treats. Elliott throws a blade that kills Chris from behind. Jared and Lizzie immediately and repeatedly stab at the two bodies. Jared decapitates the male’s head to show it to the Ice Cream Man, but he and his sister are horrified to discover they were tricked into killing their captive parents.

Mia shoves ice cream into Tommy’s mouth, making him part of the mob. Jared and Lizzie realize the Priest was really the Necromancer all along. The Ice Cream Man leaves the siblings in tears as he leads Bayleen Bay’s children out of town.

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Review:

Snack on your preferred Pepperidge Farms product while thinking back to a time when filmmaker Eli Roth was the toast of Terror Town. The “Cabin Fever” (review here) writer/director made quite a name for himself with the horror of “Hostel” during the “torture porn” boom, and by befriending Quentin Tarantino for a couple of creative collaborations. He invited different kinds of names, however, with controversial conduct and comments that have left him labeled with more than a few undesirable accusations.

Fortunately for Roth, genre fanbases seem willing to overlook proven and unproven crimes, apparently as long as the work warrants a willingness to separate the art from the artist. A certain someone had nearly no problem making three “Jeepers Creepers” movies despite being convicted of s.a. against a 12-year-old actor. Meanwhile, continued appreciation for “An American Werewolf in London” remains enough to disregard John Landis’s association with the gruesome deaths of Vic Morrow and two children on the set of “Twilight Zone: The Movie.”

Unfortunately for Roth, his headlines sustain more attention due to occurring in a chronically online era, as opposed to the comparatively clueless 1980s, when scandals like a Hollywood star killing two people in a car collision didn’t instantly end a career. Also unfortunately for Roth, he didn’t make “Animal House” or “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” When he builds a bridge too far with a problematic persona, then blows it up with incendiary statements, a flippant horror-comedy as shallow as “Ice Cream Man” doesn’t possess anywhere close to the engineering ability necessary to begin welding those broken girders back together.

It’s utterly bizarre that Eli Roth, who has written dozens of screenplays, has seemingly no idea how to sensibly structure “Ice Cream Man.” Scratch that. Maybe he merely has no desire for this film to aim for a more prestigious final landing spot than Tubi’s bottomless B-movie backlog.

Simple is as simple does, stereotypical is as stereotypical does, and “Ice Cream Man’s” setup is both. The fictional small town of Bayleen Bay will be familiar to everyone who has ever seen an idyllic suburban setting in a movie before. An inordinate number of children simultaneously frolic in a local park, jumping rope, playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and engaging in sharp snark during a Little League game featuring the usual gang of stocky bullies, scrawny dweebs, and aggressive coaches treating disinterested children like disappointing major leaguers.

Enter the Ice Cream Man, whom the movie takes its title from even though his total amount of screentime probably doesn’t tip over four or five minutes. He never says a single word. His van appears more often than he does. The vehicle’s jingle is heard several times too, but the Ice Cream Man himself is hardly a persistent presence at all, making for a villain more vanilla than the flavor.

Evil comes from his sweet treats instead. With ominous names such as Locust Lick and Serpent Swirl, the boys and girls of Bayleen Bay eagerly eat up frozen desserts served from the Ice Cream Man’s van. All except for Jared Mayfair, whose lactose intolerance prevents him from partaking, thus making him inadvertently immune to whatever sinister Svengali-ness soon turns the town’s children into mind-controlled killers.

One of two honorable mentions goes to Charlie Zeltzer, who plays Jared. Whether it comes inherently from the actor or from how his character is handled, there’s a charm to Jared’s nerdiness that makes him plenty likable as the large cast’s young anchor. The ways he interacts with various sorts of people. The ways he doesn’t overreact to uncomfortable situations. Jared comes across as a believably boyish Everykid with a smart head on slumped shoulders, and it’s easy to identify with him.

Too bad other roles aren’t developed beyond narrow traits like protective teen sister, dimwitted ex-boyfriend, one schoolteacher, a different schoolteacher, and an indistinguishable assortment of undefined classmates. Not that “Ice Cream Man” would know what to do with them if anyone else had to facilitate more than one beat. The screenplay orders events and places people in them so erratically, established relationships completely disconnect while others are forced into existence for no other reason than someone who should be in that situation was inconveniently stuck somewhere else.

Jared’s best friend Elliott is one of the first kids to be affected by the ice cream, which is fine, arguably even necessary for the narrative. What this means though, is that Jared has to team up with other unaffected children who aren’t even introduced until more than a third of the movie is already over. There should be a Losers Club-like chemistry creating camaraderie among the core trio, yet they’re really just randos thrown together because neither writer bothered to think of a more sensible option.

About an hour into the movie, one of Jared’s bullies joins his group of unaffected survivors. Except it’s not even the Gaten Matarazzo clone who beats on Jared and insults another little boy in front of his mother, or the one who caused some conflict at their baseball game and cynically humiliated Jared in public. It’s a guy who briefly threatened to steal Jared’s bike outside his buddy’s house during a 30-second encounter. Why would he matter more to this moment than either of the other two bullies?

From decapitations to disembowelings, the only other honorable mention goes to the movie’s suitably splattery practical effects gushing blood over all kinds of gruesome death scenes. But without any interesting arcs, side plots, or even a main plot to go along with the gore, “Ice Cream Man” devolves into a lot of meaningless mayhem.

The haphazard horror already feels rushed, then a super-silly climax that of course involves an “Old Man Exposition” dumping a bunch of backstory furthers the notion that how the film crossed its finish line no longer mattered, if it ever did. Any lingering doubt is definitively erased by an end credits song where Snoop Dogg repeats the same six-word lyrics, “you scream, I scream, we scream, ice cream” over and over until everyone in the audience leaves with the sense that many involved with the movie may have treated it as a lark that only required minimal effort.

Maybe some stoner in a band t-shirt will amusedly shout “Gnarly!” at some of the more chaotic carnage. More discerning tastes, specifically those that want at least a little storytelling with their slaughter, should find something else to scarf down. Preferably something that doesn’t appear to have been lit, shot, and regarded like a cheap made-for-cable movie.

Review Score: 35

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