Joel on Film

A diabolical sense of wicked humor emerges from the dark heart of Ice Cream Man, the latest cautionary fable of sorts from co-writer/director Eli Roth. It’s the “of sorts” that ultimately gets in the way of this mixture of black comedy and grisly violence, following a familiar path as a small town’s children are tricked and hoodwinked into committing acts of savage brutality upon their parents and teachers and, really, any other adult unlucky enough to cross them. There is a pied piper quality to this scenario, except we’re never quite sure that Roth has anything to say here.

For the middle section of the film, which features the majority of the bloody, gory and gruesome violence, that question-mark of an issue almost doesn’t matter, if only because Roth provides an extended set piece that is quite virtuoso in how it depicts every step by meticulous step of the takeover of the children. The culprit here is, obviously, the “Ice Cream Man” (Ari Millen), who did once have a name but which, a late character who exists to provide exposition tells us, was rather lost in the midst of the bit of lore that dictates his appearance. It’s a sign of confidence in the eerie presence of the man that Roth and co-screenwriter Noah Belson have no interest until roughly the last 20 minutes in what brought about the Ice Cream Man and his abilities to hoodwink children so superbly.

For his part, Millen plays the role with a pleasant, mustachioed smile behind dead gray eyes, leering when he isn’t crouching uncannily out of his ice-cream truck, delivering the melting sweets to unsuspecting kids. The main action here follows Elliot (Luke Dietz), one of the few children not affected by the Ice Cream Man’s spell on account of his lactose intolerance, and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), on whom Elliot has a crush. Since neither of them ate the cursed ice cream, they must avoid the zombified other children, who awaken from their beds, enact unspeakable horrors upon their respective parents and proceed through the town to do the same to others.

It’s sort of refreshing, by the way, that neither Roth (who also plays Elliot’s dad, with Karen Cliche as mom) nor Belson was completely thoughtless about the logic that drives the curse at play here. It turns children into mindless tools for violence, but the implication is that it would have no effect upon adults at all. Meanwhile, teenagers are merely paralyzed or put into sugary comas, as we find out in a subplot following Elliot’s sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), who wakes up unable to move her arms and in need of a way to vomit out the small portion of ice cream she managed to eat (by the way, it’s a little unnerving when one character’s bulimia is used as a life-saving measure at least a couple times).

As for the scenes of grisly violence, Roth indeed provides no quarter to the victims, and it’s telling that the carnage begins with an up-close-and-personal decapitation by hacksaw and only escalates from there. A teacher is technically stoned to death (with excess bricks from the roof of the school), another is hacked into two with many whacks from an ax (after having a bike ridden over her midriff), and by the end, a once-innocent playground becomes a war zone of scattered limbs and entrails, while a “game of tag” is partly played with a severed hand. It seems that Roth is leaning hard into the universal truth that kids will play anywhere, upon any structure, wielding whatever plaything they find, then twisting that truth into an unthinkably sick direction.

Thankfully, much of this is played, again, with a sense of devilish humor, and since the body parts strewn across much of the landscape are obviously props and makeup prosthetics—with not a lick of realism to them, meaning the gross-out effect is slightly more palatable—it actually does muster up many of the laughs that it desires. The third act finally confronts the legend of the Ice Cream Man, a set of rules and a mission to defeat him, and a showdown undermined slightly by a couple of developments that stretch logistical believability. Then again, after all the build-up toward what we assume to be a sequel stinger, it’s impressive how Roth subverts our expectation by, instead, providing a pitiless, cruelly ironic non-ending that cuts to credits practically mid-thought.

That’s genuinely funny in a very dark way, but it’s around the time—much earlier—the kids remove a man’s skull cap and serve him a scoop of his own brain in an ice cream cone that we realize just how little actual subversion means to Roth with Ice Cream Man. He’s more interested in the shock-and-awe aspect, and after an admittedly impressive display of it, the movie reveals itself to have nowhere else, really, to go.

Rating: **½ (out of ****)