Film Review: Ice Cream Man

Ice Cream Man
Director: Eli Roth
The Horror Section, MCT Studios
In Theaters: 08.07.2026

Just as a book can’t be judged by its cover, a movie can’t be judged by its trailer. That being said, when the trailer lays out what you can expect from a movie as clearly as the red band trailer for Ice Cream Man did, there’s a limit to how much a viewer  who saw said trailer can complain about getting exactly what was advertised. But you can (and should) expect the full movie to deliver something more fully realized than the trailer, and that’s where Eli Roth‘s new splatterfest proves to be a very frustrating waste of time.

A quiet summer in the suburban community of Bayleen Bay turns into a waking nightmare when a mysterious Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen, Orphan Black) begins serving children treats with unfortunate side effects: the frozen treats transform children into violent, uncontrollable versions of themselves. When most of the town’s kids fall under his influence, lactose-intolerant 13-year-old Jared (Charlie Zeltzer, the voice of Percy on Thomas & Friends), along with fellow tweens Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman, Small Achievable Goals) and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly, Festival of the Living Dead) — who also haven’t eaten the ice cream — become the unlikely survivors fighting to stop the madness. The group must uncover the truth behind the ice cream man’s horrifying scheme before their community is destroyed by a wave of childhood innocence turned deadly.

Roth is the exact opposite of many Hollywood directors in that his talent seems to be greater than his ambition: a gift for creating atmospheric tension and for getting strong, natural performances from kids is wasted on a movie that is constantly resisting the urge to be deeper and smarter. While it’s at least a more coherent story than the abysmal Borderlands (2024), the overbidding mission of Ice Cream Man is to revel in shock value, whether it’s cutting off the top of a teacher’s head and making him eat his own brains with an ice cream scoop, or a group of girls playing jump rope with with a length of human intestine. The gore is, for the most part, deliberately cheesy enough that most of the time I going myself more grossed out by the excessive vomit-based gags than by the blood and guts, but the latter comes at such a relentless pace that the movie isn’t even half over before it’s no longer shocking, upsetting or darkly funny. It’s just unbearably tedious and repetitive, which I found myself wondering how Roth himself didn’t get bored by it. The occasional attempts at satire or substance go nowhere, as it’s repeatedly teased that Mia hasn’t been turned because she’s got an eating disorder and made herself throw up the ice cream. This culminates in a throw away joke where she states “I’m a 12-year-old girl. Of course I know how to make myself throw up.” Maybe I’m overthinking by thinking anything in a movie like this should be treated with any degree of sensitivity, but The Substance gave us far more effective shock value while having something to say about body issues: using it as a joke at the expense of a child grossed me out far more than any of the cartoonish violence.

And the big reveal about the Ice Cream Man’s motivations is both tacky and almost directly lifted from A Nightmare on Elm Street. Obviously bloody horror still has its enthusiastic audience, but it’s hard not to feel like using eating disorders and child sexual abuse as devices in this sort of “entertainment” couldn’t be doing a worse job of reading the room. 

The three young leads do a great job, with Waldman and O’Reilly making such likeable heroes that in the moments when it’s simply a zombie flick with kids as the heroes and the zombies, I found myself really wanting to like it. Sarah Abbott (The Braid) as Jared’s older sister, Lizzie, gets one great opportunity to show her talent in a sequence where she’s been partially paralyzed by the effects of the ice cream, but it’s such a stock, sexualized older sister character that she gets little rose out of the role. Zeltzer is endearing as Jared, but the constant string of profanities he’s spewing are an odd match to the character.

With Ice Cream Man, Roth is banking on the idea that its target audience will run toward the promise of mean spirited excess like kids hearing the music from an ice cream truck, and that they don’t want anything more. Maybe he just really knows his fans, and maybe he’s selling them as short as he is himself. I can’t help but feel that a guilty pleasure should still be more pleasure than guilt, that even a small amount of real effort and cleverness could have made for something that doesn’t so easily melt away. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more film reviews by Patrick Gibbs:
Film Review: The Samurai and the Prisoner
Film Review: Her Private Hell

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