In 1995, cult actor Clint Howard (brother of the more-famous Ron Howard) starred in a straight-to-video horror comedy called Ice Cream Man about a group of kids who think that their local ice cream man is a serial killer.
Modern horror icon Eli Roth’s new movie of the same name is not a remake of that movie. But it does share some common ground.
Ice Cream Man is about a town called Baleen Bay where, suddenly on a summer morning, all of the children start acting crazy and murdering the adults. A group of children who have not joined in on the carnage figure out that what is causing the frenzy is the frozen treats that have been provided by the titular Ice Cream Man (Orphan Black’s Ari Millen). It’s up to the unaffected kids to save what’s left of the town from the clutches of the evil sweet-dealer.
Eli Roth goes for the throat with Ice Cream Man. It’s simultaneously brutal and heartwarming, both an extreme horror film and a coming-of-age comedy. There’s blood spilling, spraying, and splattering all around these kids, and even though they’re mostly flat, cookie-cutter characters, the audience really roots for them to save their little town. In terms of Roth’s earlier works, this is Hostel-meets-The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Kid power with a lot of entrails.
The big commonalties between Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man and the 1995 movie are twofold – there’s a murderous ice cream man, and there are some kids who are on to him. But that’s where the similarities end. Roth’s movie is more of a Pied Piper-meets-Greek Mythology tale, as well as a clever Living Dead zombie movie crossed with a kindertrauma flick.
While that may sound like a lot of influences to soak up, that’s just scratching the surface. Roth has always been a student of cinema, and Ice Cream Man features visual and thematic nods to just about every horror movie imaginable. The overall arc feels like Weapons or Cooties, the deeper story hints at The Children and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Roth lifts visual gags from The Burning, The Ring, and I Saw the TV Glow, just to name a few. There’s even a sideways glance towards Ridley Scott’s Hannibal.
All these tributes and homages aside, Ice Cream Man is definitely an Eli Roth movie. No one can combine the grotesque with the campy quite like Roth, and both his horror and his humor are on full display. The violence is gory and graphic, to the point where it crosses over the line to become humor. A fine example of this is a passing shot of a little schoolgirl making snow angels in the spilled blood from one of her slaughtered teachers. Roth seems to delight in this kind of carnage, and the audience delights right along with him.
The violence and brutality in Ice Cream Man cannot be overstated. Every kill is more gruesome and over-the-top than the last. And the fact that it is children committing these atrocities makes what’s onscreen all the more shocking. There is very little child-on-child violence – the affected children don’t harm each other, they just try to feed ice cream to the unaffected in order to get them to join in. But when the kids go after the grown-ups, all bets are off. And even the most mundane of schoolyard accessories becomes a weapon of adult destruction.
Ice Cream Man feels like Eli Roth’s love letter to all of those killer kids movies of the seventies. It never takes itself too seriously, so it’s a fun ride. Inventive? No. But fun, nonetheless. This is modern B-movie campiness in its purest form.
Eli Roth is an acquired taste, and even some horror fans dislike his work. Those folks should stay away from Ice Cream Man. Because this is Eli Roth being Eli Roth. Next to Thanksgiving, this may be the most Eli Roth movie that Eli Roth has ever made. And he’s not even sorry.
GRADE: B
Release Date: August 7, 2026
Runtime: 1 hour 26 minutes