Eli Roth might be a very good person, but I can’t say I particularly appreciate either his films or his understanding of art. Yes, I’m someone who encourages and appreciates art—especially cinema—being unsettling and provocative. But I believe more in the power of words and storytelling, and I’ve never been able to like Eli Roth’s poorly written films that have little to say and whose sole and ultimate purpose is to subject us to scenes of crazy killing and blood.
Nevertheless, I watched Ice Cream Man with high expectations. Because it has a very interesting premise. The idea that came to Eli Roth years ago when he saw an ice cream truck and wondered “Who is this guy?” and “Why do children trust this man?” made me ask the same questions. I thought a really good horror story could come out of this. What’s more, I had seen Roth say about the film that “the worst thing is when your child turns against you.” So there was the potential not just for a bloody horror movie idea, but for a truly unsettling story built around childhood, parenthood, and the sense of trust.
The fact that the film couldn’t be developed for many years, that Roth eventually founded his own production company The Horror Section and made the film without studio interference, and that he described it as a project he had wanted to do for years were other factors that raised my expectations. On top of that, the fact that Weapons in 2025 had successfully turned the idea of children being mysteriously controlled into a solid horror film made me think Ice Cream Man could take a similar idea somewhere more interesting.
But it seems I was wrong. Because what I saw was a film that turned into a gore-filled and much more superficial version of Weapons. Ice Cream Man presents a world that is as colorful as possible, and then soaks that world in blood. Just like Happy Tree Friends. Do you remember that series? It had almost all the elements of a classic children’s cartoon. The only difference was that after a while those cute characters started killing each other in the most savage ways possible. Ice Cream Man builds its horror element on a similar idea. A colorful, cute, and ice-cream-sweet world is suddenly soaked in blood and brutality.
When you first hear it, this can really sound like a good idea. The problem is that the film doesn’t have a good script or plot capable of carrying this idea.Although the idea established in the first act of the film is intriguing, you don’t really feel the story progressing afterward. The children eat the ice cream, change, and start killing the adults. A few surviving children try to understand why this is happening and escape. Then the film, instead of developing the story, starts jumping from one death scene to the next. What’s more, there is a backstory behind the film that could actually be quite interesting. The ice cream man’s being unjustly accused years earlier, the events turning into a desire for revenge, and the children being used against their own families are ideas the film could have lingered on a bit more.
But most of these feel like tools used simply to get to more gore scenes.That’s why I think the biggest problem with Ice Cream Man isn’t that it’s bloody. The problem is that blood and violence take the place of everything the film could have said. From after the first act right to the end of the film, you watch nothing but savage deaths. And that is exactly the fundamental problem I’ve had with Eli Roth’s cinema for years. Being unsettling and saying something unsettling are not the same thing. No matter how much a film confronts you with blood, dismembered bodies, or creative death scenes, if there’s nothing to say behind all of that, after a while it just turns into noise.
The starting point of Ice Cream Man, however, promised the exact opposite of this. The idea of a figure children trust turning them into people who will kill their families is actually a quite unsettling one. But instead of dwelling on the fear this idea could create, the film tries to generate as much gore as possible from the idea itself. As a result, what we have is a film that starts from an interesting horror idea and, instead of developing it, constantly tries to become bloodier. If you’re not a fan of the gore genre—and to be honest, I’ve never fully understood why anyone is a fan of this genre—I don’t expect watching this film to make you happy or entertain you in any way. The fact that this film Eli Roth had wanted to make for years ultimately turned into something so superficial is, for me, a bigger disappointment than the film itself.
