Mr. Roth, it's time to change your approach to your movies.
“Mom, can we have a hostel at home?”
“We already have a hostel at home.”
Hostel at home (Ice Cream Man).
If you are 38 years old and still watch cartoons (yes, I'm talking about you, CaptainRosomak), then you have probably come across a so-called Halloween episode at some point. They appear quite often, and the more recognizable the franchise, the more elaborate the “scariness” tends to be. In newer animated shows, for example The Amazing World of Gumball or Adventure Time, we have been given essentially the same concept: something turns the inhabitants into zombies, and only the main characters can somehow save the world.
Eli Roth seems to have gotten a little lost somewhere along the way. You can see that his beginnings were more niche and aimed at viewers who knew exactly what they were getting into. Over time, however, he seems to have become too influenced by Hollywood and started making movies that have very little to do with horror and are instead more like cartoons with a horror coating.
*Ice Cream Man* is a strange movie. It looks as if it was originally supposed to be a 30-minute episode of some kind of anthology, but something went wrong and, in the end, it became a full-length movie.Maybe I'll start with what actually worked, because, to my surprise, there are some positive aspects to this thing.
The biggest advantage is the young cast. You can see that the kids are having fun with their roles. They don't take anything too seriously and fire off dry jokes — so dry that I actually had to get something to drink — but it works. You watch them with sympathy, almost as if you were watching a cartoon that had suddenly brought its characters to life for one episode.
Of course, there is a lot of nonsense in this movie, and the closer we get to the finale, the more I started wondering why the filmmaker decided to combine this laid-back movie with gore — unfortunately, gore that often doesn't work very well.
The concept itself, as we already know, is fairly overused and inspired by the Pied Piper of Hamelin (yes, one of the characters actually has Hamlin as his last name).
The movie offers a rather peculiar take on revenge through a grotesque and macabre lens. The titular character arrives in town to make every child happy by giving them a serving of ice cream.
And if the movie had consistently leaned into that kind of grotesque tone, you could probably overlook a lot of its problems. But it is extremely uneven. One moment we get a serious scene, only for the movie to follow it up with some ridiculous gore that adds absolutely nothing to the whole thing.
Everything might have worked if it weren't for those kids and their intolerance to ice cream.
Yes, the main theme is eating ice cream and how the town changes afterward. However, the director apparently had to think very hard about how to make the protagonists immune to the suggestion, so he came up with all sorts of complicated solutions.
Unfortunately, the finale gets lost — and it gets lost so badly that even the characters don't seem to know what they are supposed to do. We get an explanation of the entire conspiracy and an ending that is probably the least satisfying part of the movie. There is, admittedly, a reference to A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it is filmed so poorly that it is difficult to even compare the two.
This could have been a good movie. The young protagonists tried to keep things light, but everything else somehow falls short, including the titular Ice Cream Man, who has some unfinished business with the residents.
I hope the director stops playing around with Hollywood and goes back to making cheap horror movies, because that's when things seemed to work for him. The bigger the budget, the worse the script and the worse the execution.
30/100 — that's the score I can give this movie.
Oh, and I didn't even mention that the movie contains quite a lot of shots generated using AI, which unfortunately makes the overall experience even worse.
Rating: 30/100
