By 
Ice Cream Man (2026)
We all scream.
I scream. You scream. Mostly, you’ll just want it to end.
Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man feels like someone took a few scoops from 1995’s cult Ice Cream Man, added a sprinkling of Weapons, smothered the whole thing in Terrifier-style gore and hoped nobody would notice the flavor underneath was completely vanilla.
To be clear, this isn’t officially a remake of the Clint Howard-starring film — although the similarities are obvious enough that comparisons are inevitable. In fact, Roth had reportedly been developing the concept independently for more than two decades. This time, Ari Millen stars as the sinister ice-cream vendor who rolls into an idyllic suburban town and begins handing out frozen treats to the local kids. Unfortunately, there’s something nasty in the soft serve: the children who eat it become homicidal, turning playgrounds, classrooms and suburban streets into increasingly bloody killing grounds.
One of the children spared from the madness is Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), whose lactose intolerance suddenly becomes the greatest superpower imaginable. Alongside fellow unaffected kids Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), as well as his older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), Jared attempts to survive as the neighborhood melts into chaos.
It’s exactly the kind of ridiculous premise that should be an absolute sundae of splatter-movie fun.
Instead, Ice Cream Man leaves a seriously bad taste in your mouth.
This flavor comes with a killer aftertaste.
Roth is certainly capable of inventive horror. The original Hostel (2005) was one of the best horror films of its era, with Roth emerging as a genre talent to watch. Even when his movies don’t entirely work, there’s usually something gleefully nasty bubbling beneath the surface. Here, though, he seems so preoccupied with being offensive, disgusting and deliberately tasteless that he forgets to make any of it particularly funny, scary or entertaining.
The selling point is obviously the kills, with adults dispatched in supposedly hilarious “kiddy” ways. There are moments where the practical effects deliver some satisfyingly disgusting results, and every now and then you can see the movie Roth probably thought he was making.
But if inventive gore is what you want, Damien Leone’s Terrifier films have already turned elaborate practical carnage into an art form — and somehow manage to do it with considerably more personality and visual flair. Here, the blood flows freely, but the imagination frequently feels freezer-burned.
That becomes an even bigger problem because the movie itself often looks remarkably bland, cheap and uninspired. The cinematography rarely produces an interesting composition, the lighting frequently feels flat, the suburban locations are strangely anonymous and the production design does little to give the film a distinctive visual identity of its own. For something built around colorful ice cream, childhood nostalgia and outrageous violence, it’s surprisingly flavorless to look at.
There has also been controversy surrounding the film’s use of generative AI, which Roth has since acknowledged was used in a small portion of several scenes. While the use of AI in filmmaking remains the subject of considerable debate, it isn’t necessarily the movie’s biggest problem here. Like any emerging technology, it has the potential to serve as a creative tool when guided, refined and incorporated by human artists to support a production rather than replace the creative process altogether.
The much bigger issue here is everything surrounding it. If the cinematography, production design, editing and visual storytelling were firing on all cylinders, a few AI-assisted elements wouldn’t suddenly ruin the entire sundae. Ice Cream Man simply isn’t visually interesting enough in the first place.
The screenplay, co-written by Roth and Noah Belson, is even messier. The film opens with a neighborhood full of kids playing outside — skipping ropes, riding bikes and generally occupying the streets in a way that feels conspicuously removed from modern childhood, where screens, phones and gaming tend to compete heavily for attention. Perhaps it’s intended as a deliberately nostalgic, almost storybook version of suburbia, but the movie never really establishes that tone clearly enough for it to feel intentional.
From there, characters behave according to whatever the next scene requires, important details don’t add up and the story keeps piling toppings onto a cone that was already beginning to collapse. By the time the third-act revelation arrives, it’s both easy to spot and baffling once you actually start thinking about how it’s supposed to work.
Worst of all, the movie somehow feels far longer than it needs to. At just 86 minutes, Ice Cream Man is hardly an epic, yet there simply isn’t enough story here to justify how stretched-out the experience feels. What should have been a quick, nasty sugar rush becomes the cinematic equivalent of eating an entire tub of cheap ice cream after it has already melted — increasingly unpleasant and eventually something you just want to finish.
The performances don’t offer much of a cherry on top either. The cast is made up largely of lesser-known performers, and few manage to elevate the material. Ari Millen certainly looks the part as the Ice Cream Man, but the character is more concept than personality, while Charlie Zeltzer and the young ensemble do what they can with material that mostly asks them to scream, run or behave psychotically. The supporting adults fare little better.
Ironically, Roth himself provides one of the movie’s more enjoyable moments when he pops up as Marty, Jared’s father, alongside Karen Cliche as his mother during a dinner-table scene. It’s a brief sequence, but the knowingly ridiculous dialogue actually lands, giving the scene the kind of fun, campy energy the rest of the movie so often seems to be reaching for.
Another perfectly normal day in education.
And that’s ultimately what makes Ice Cream Man so disappointing.
An evil ice-cream man turning children into pint-sized psychopaths is an inherently fun horror concept. This should have been colorful, ridiculous, inventive and completely unhinged — a wicked little midnight movie dripping with blood, sprinkles and bad taste.
Instead, it’s mean-spirited without being clever, gross without being particularly shocking, funny without producing many laughs and messy without ever becoming enjoyably chaotic.
There are a couple of decent practical-effects kills buried underneath all that melted sludge, but they aren’t enough to save it.
Ice Cream Man may promise two scoops of insanity, but what Roth ultimately serves is a melted mess. Skip it.
1.5 / 5 – Poor
Reviewed by Stu Cachia (S-Littner)
Ice Cream Man is distributed by Studio Canal Australia
