Movie Review: Ice Cream Man
Ice Cream Man was self-financed by the film’s director, Eli Roth. Following his last film, Borderlands, a certified flop in every regard, Roth wanted to do away with the studio system and executive oversight and make a film without anyone giving him any notes. He also chose to release Ice Cream Man unrated, giving himself free rein over the blood, gore, and chaos of his newest splatter-horror film.
While Roth isn’t the first director to finance his own film, as directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Costner, and M. Night Shyamalan have all done something similar relatively recently, there is something admirable about an established director going fully independent and seeing his full vision come to life. They’re putting themselves, their finances, and their creativity on the line. Anything that goes right with the film is all because of them, but also, anything that is wrong or bad with the film also lands on them.
While an admirable and ballsy move to self-finance your own movie for complete control, that doesn’t change the quality of the movie, and unfortunately for Ice Cream Man, the quality isn’t very good. While you feel Roth’s glee as the buckets of blood fill and the bodies stack up, the story and any character development get lost amongst the chaos.
Ice Cream Man takes place over the course of one day in the idyllic town of Bayleen Bay. The sun is shining, the entire neighborhood is out, and kids are running amok as a local youth baseball game is taking place. The Ice Cream Man (played by Air Millen) shows up, and everyone lines up to get their ice cream, particularly the kids. Every kid gets their ice cream except Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who is lactose intolerant, and is only stopped from eating the ice cream because his sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) grabs the cone from his hands.
During the night, every kid who ate ice cream begins murdering their parents in insane and brutal ways. The following morning at school, the murderous children show up in a hypnotic state with ice cream all over their faces and begin murdering the teachers and any adult they see. Jared, along with a couple of other kids who did not eat the ice cream, try to survive the day while figuring out how to stop the Ice Cream Man from continuing to feed ice cream to the other kids.
Ice Cream Man’s biggest strength is what Roth has been good at in his entire career: the gore. Ice Cream Man is incredibly violent, and all the violence comes from pre-teens killing adults and authority figures. At first, the deaths are shocking, as seeing a nine-year-old decapitate their mother with a saw and bash their father’s head in with a hammer is jarring. Roth spared no expense on the blood, guts, brains, and gore that are spewed across Bayleen Bay. After the initial shock of it all, some of the kills become creative and amusing, like when a teacher gets the top of his cut off, and one child starts scooping his brains out with an ice cream scoop. Demented? Absolutely. Inventive fun? Definitely.
Roth co-wrote the script with Noah Belson, but Ice Cream Man felt like the script was written with only an outline and nothing more. The dialog is at best overly generic and flat; there is hardly any plot or story, and when it tries to have one by adding a random dark family secret as a supposed twist, it wasn’t shocking or interesting. The characters have the emotional depth of a sprinkle. I couldn’t tell you one of their names without looking it up on IMDb or what their motivations or emotional arc was. Roth seemingly only cared about the different ways children could murder adults. It’s the worst kind of style-over-substance movie: it has no substance, and it is stylistically boring and sometimes ugly.
Roth leans heavily into the B-horror genre with Ice Cream Man, but he forgot to make the movie entertaining. The fun kills run thin quickly, and Ice Cream Man becomes an overlong, redundant bloodbath with zero depth.
TL;DR Review of Ice Cream Man
- Horrifically violent and gory.
- Some of the kills are creative and fun, but they get redundant after a while.
- Terribly written, acted, and directed. Visually uninteresting, terrible story and dialogue, and the actors are forgettable.
- Overlong for a movie with such a short runtime.
- One of the worst movies of 2026.
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