Ice Cream Man Review: Summer Bummer

There was a brief moment of hope for Eli Roth as a filmmaker. In 2018, the gorehound director made his first foray into kid-friendly territory with the charming The House With a Clock in its Walls, and three years later experimented with documentaries with shark advocacy piece Fin. But his urges won out and back to horror he went. The first return, Thanksgiving, was schlocky fun. His latest, Ice Cream Man, is about as much fun as biting down on an ice pop with a cracked tooth.

Somewhere in the suburban nowheresville of Bayleen Bay, an evil ice cream man (Ari Millen, Vicious Fun)  has appeared, smiling a creepy grin under the weaselliest of moustaches and driving an old-fashioned ice cream truck, wordlessly handing out ice cream bars and cones to every passing middle schooler. But hidden in his freezer there’s a twist more devious than just a caramel swirl: Any kid that snarfs down his frozen dairy products sprouts a layer of sprinkles around their mouths and then butchers any nearby adult in comedy-horror fashion. Of course, one of the few kids that isn’t affected is Jared (Charlie Zeltzer, The Handmaid’s Tale), the archetypical picked-on dweeb whose lactose intolerance finally pays off.

Roth and cowriter Noah Belson could have turned the mob of mini-murderers into brain-freeze zombies, so at least they deserve a little credit for not harvesting the lowest hanging fruit imaginable for flavoring. Instead, they’re clearly influenced by the sleazier but more fun Spanish horror Who Can Kill a Child?, John Carpenter’s “town with a hidden secret” classic The Fog, and, peculiarly, Hitchcock’s eternally terrifying The Birds. Yet Ice Cream Man is neither as entertaining or twisted as any of those.

Roth seems to have forgotten everything he learned about facilitating rounded performances from a young cast in The House With a Clock in its Walls. When Jared finally teams up with his also-unaffected classmates, Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), all they do is scream, drop f-bombs, and prompt adults to drop exposition. It’s not that the kid actors are bad, but they’re given nothing to do.

Worse, Roth himself actually turns up in one of the worst director cameos of all time as Jared’s lawyer father. His motivation is basically “tell dad jokes,” but that’s more a reflection of the filmmaker than the character, who hopefully made himself laugh because he’s getting none from the audience. There’s even a teen bulimia joke that only a 54-year-old man in overextended adolescence could find funny.

The whole film becomes briefly much more interesting in the second act as Jared’s teen sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), attempts to rescue him and his friends from the school. Abbott’s flair for physical comedy is one of the few redeeming aspects of Ice Cream Man, especially in one hilarious sequence during which she flops across her bedroom after being paralyzed by a not-so-sweet frozen treat. Maybe if Roth had focused on her more, or thought to be creative with the creature-themed bars advertised on the side of the Ice Cream Man’s truck, there’d be something here than just an extended show reel for the makeup folks at Applied Arts FX Studio. At least they do a decent job, even if it’s not enough to cover over the rest of the film’s deficiencies.

Flatly shot by reality TV veteran Simon Shohet in the broadest of daylight, and edited with zero zip by Matt Lyon, it’s nowhere near as funny as Roth seems to think. Even the gore effects start to become a bore after the initial schoolyard bloodbath. After 20 minutes of kids murdering unsuspecting and disbelieving adults in a myriad of gruesome ways, there’s nothing left for Ice Cream Man to deliver. It’s just more interchangeable adults we’ve never seen before looking shocked as a bunch of pre-teens start scooping their eyeballs out.

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This article appears in August 7 • 2026.