As an avid consumer and enjoyer of bad movies, I was hoping that director Eli Roth's "Ice Cream Man," released Aug. 7, would be so bad that it was good. Instead, the resulting film was gory, gross and, with the open usage of AI generation, unredeemable.
The film follows Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), a lactose-intolerant teenager who notices that the suspicious ice cream man (Ari Millen) of his town Bayleen Bay seems to follow him everywhere he goes. However, all the other kids seem to be mesmerized by the ice cream man's sweet treats and, when night comes, the kids that ate the ice cream seem to enter a trance-like state and murder their parents in horribly gruesome ways.
In a segment which felt like complete overkill, we see all the disgusting ways that these kids go about ending their parents' lives. It felt repetitive how director Eli Roth made sure that we saw nearly every adult we had come across previously in the film get murdered.
While the concept of kids becoming violent killers makes the film stand out, I left the theaters feeling gross. Obviously, they had to use real child actors to play these parts, so when the on-screen gore was exceptionally intense, I started to question whether subjecting these kids to playing out this constant violence was morally right.
By releasing the film unrated, I think Roth was trying to achieve something like "Terrifier 3." If a film is unrated, they aren't held to the same expectations to trim out some gore that keeps a movie within the R rating. But I don't see "Ice Cream Man" captivating gory horror fans in the same way as it lacks a great story and a somewhat likeable villain like Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) from the “Terrifier” franchise.
Instead, this movie lacks in every department I can feasibly think of, ranking below many other bad horror movies I have watched, despite not having even half of the $5.5 million budget Roth used for his film.
Even the film's plot goes to outrageous lengths to further disgust and traumatize viewers as Jared and his older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) accidentally kill their parents. The Priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) stuck in the Ice Cream Man's freezer, gives them the advice to kill two entities in an unmarked grave, lying to them as he is in cahoots with the devilish Ice Cream Man.
It was so needlessly gruesome that I just sat in the theater repeatedly thinking "No they didn't, no they didn’t." I think it takes a whole entire separate level of audacity to make the kids accidently kill their own parents on top of the depravity this movie already had.
It also felt like an unnecessary plot point to have the Ice Cream Man leave the two siblings alone to deal with their grief after this event. Why couldn't it have just ended at everyone else getting infected, instead of adding the extra insult to injury of living their lives with everyone else infected?
But what made this already disappointing film so much worse is that Roth seems to not value real artists.
In interviews, Roth admitted that he used generative AI for a "few scenes" in the film after viewers spectacled that the film contained AI-generated animations when he previously stated an animation team drew them. It saddens me that the use of AI is especially clear in this film, following a disheartening amount of real artists getting snubbed out of job opportunities for AI. Why take a unique concept and use something as creatively destructive as generative AI?
As someone who often finds enjoyment in even the most gory and haunting films, I find very few horror movies that I completely dislike. So, if you’re still thinking about going to watch “Ice Cream Man,” I hope my disdain for the film sways you the other way.
