As a fan of horror and a general lover of Eli Roth’s films, I can not believe what I watched last night with Ice Cream Man.
There is enough discourse surrounding the use of AI in the film, so I won’t touch on that too much. I really want to focus on the terrible script and the nonsensical construction of the film. From the opening shot of the ice cream man ‘arriving’ in town despite showing him driving out of town, I knew it would be a slog.
I don’t fault Roth for writing himself a character in the film, though I do have to wonder why he wrote himself as a character who wanted to go to the waterpark to see his daughters friends in bikinis. He wrote his daughter to be a junior (year 11 in Australia) - he didn’t even write her as an 18 year old senior finishing high school, he actively chose to make her younger than that and there is no plot reason why.
Speaking of no plot reasoning, there is a scene in the film where aforementioned teenage girl is half paralysed and needs to deep throat a toothbrush in order to recover. The camera angles and really the entire scene felt like fetish content since this scene made NO difference to the rest of the film. Teenagers being affected by the ice cream differently made no impact on the plot, and the movie plot would have been exactly the same without this odd scene.
Every scene dragged on, and I can’t believe the movie is only 86 minutes. I found myself checking the time more than once, which almost never happens in a horror movie.
The Ice Cream Man as a horror villain has some potential, but he was barely in it. I would have loved to see him destroying the town rather than a gaggle of random kids. Speaking of the kids - the children side characters come in and out of the movie at random, and I found myself absolutely not caring about any of them. The core kids seem to have had no interactions before the incident, so they don’t even really seem to care what happens to each other either.
None of the side characters seem to matter or make sense - there is no pay off to the general stores bell and penny game, or his ridiculous rage at the kids coming in to play it. There’s a long opening shot of the law firm, an unnecessary short since we never revisit it again in dialogue (which would have been enough).
It was so poorly written with such ridiculous dialogue that I can’t help but wonder if the script was developed by AI as well, and it makes me wonder how Roth has had so many successes in the past.
The only good aspects to the film were some of the practical effects and fun kills, and I imagine it would have been a lot of fun for the kid actors to film.
It was almost satire, it was almost parody, but it ended up just being a poor and boring slasher. I could write more, but I honestly don’t want to think about this movie anymore.
