While Hostel (2005) and Hostel: Part II (2007) are the immediate poster children for Eli Roth’s work as a horror director, his debut Cabin Fever (2002) actually offered the template to which he would most consistently adhere. Silly, irreverent, gruesome, and mean-spirited in equal measure, with Cabin Fever he established himself as a deep admirer and emulator of exploitation horror cinema. In his latest release, Ice Cream Man, it is apparent how much of that has been lost since 2002.
The film opens on a nondistinct New-England-like coastal community just days before the end of the school year and beginning of summer break. The cinematography is comically saturated and sun-drenched — artificially so. Lens flares are even employed to exaggerate this already ugly effect. Nebbish preteen Jared participates unskillfully in a baseball game, but is continually distracted by the looming presence of an ice cream truck in the distance. In Pied Piper fashion, the children of this fictitious town magnetize toward the truck’s jingle, its selection of animal-themed desserts, and its always-silent, ever-menacing, bowtie-clad driver. The dairy he slings has an infectious mouthfeel, as the children devour it like they haven’t eaten in weeks. A couple exceptions, however, are Jared — whose older sister steals his cone from him before he can dig in — and a couple of his classmates, who later will join forces as the only kids in town whose minds and bodies haven’t been invaded by the demonic ice cream.
From here, the plot is quite simple… until it isn’t. Ice Cream Man is primarily a showcase for gore and, as Roth likes to claim, “transgressive” images of children maiming and bludgeoning adults. One can’t deny that the kills are creative, including a teacher getting lobotomized by a microscope, a principal getting his brains scooped out and fed to him while still conscious, a dentist father getting impaled through the ears with his own drill (at the hands of his own children), and other adults being disemboweled, pulled apart at the torso, having their decapitated heads used for a game of tetherball, intestines being jump-roped with, and on and on. As soon as the film introduces its first kill of this nature, the carnage barrels on with little reprieve. There is also some fun dialogue that plays into Roth’s own cine-literacy, like a mom reassuring her son that, “He’ll get what’s coming to him. Bullies always do,” or an extended back-and-forth between two of our protagonists and an adult figure, who keeps piling on directives of how they’re supposed to kill the “necromancer” who’s cursed the town. The latter is but a fleeting moment of non-gore that effectively lampoons convoluted horror logic, but a moment that nonetheless serves as this film’s deathknell.
Yes, there is a necromancer and a backstory to the Ice Cream Man — who was wrongfully blamed for a priest’s molestation of a child — and the lawyer who got him convicted of somebody else’s crime turns out to be the grandfather of our main character Jared. Is this enough to make you roll your eyes? Roth is one of the major directors often grouped under the umbrella of “torture porn” due to his two Hostel films, and what made those and some of his other, more horror-comedy-leaning works so impactful was their insistence that, no matter how shockingly fun the kills were, “a resolution… is rarely found.” These are the words of Aaron Michael Kerner on the Hostel franchise, from a chapter in his book Torture Porn in the Wake of 9/11. He goes on to note that sometimes “[the protagonist even] manages to escape — even inflicting some ‘righteous’ vengeance along the way — but he ultimately never brings about the conditions that suggest that the world has been set right.”
Ice Cream Man doesn’t necessarily break with this tradition, still ending on a dour and unresolved note, but the buildup to that ending is the real issue; at every turn in its final act, the film attempts to unpack the Ice Cream Man’s lore and to mute the transgression of its seemingly unprovoked onslaught. All that impressively ridiculous gore, those cheekily-staged shock kills, the fleeting moments of thoughtful meta-humor — it all recedes within the shadow of shoddy worldbuilding, shifting our attention to more inane details like the characters suddenly being perfectly fine (meaning at normal body temperature) while trapped in a walk-in freezer’ or the pre-demonic Ice Cream Man being referred to as someone who “spoke with a foreign accent, so we assumed he came from somewhere wartorn”; or Roth’s persistent amusement with the R-word and one line in this film mentioning someone having “a touch of the ‘tism”; or the Snoop Dogg song made particularly for this film’s end credits; but most of all, Roth’s insidious politics regarding the genocide in Gaza. The only thing more regressive is this critic’s memory of Ice Cream Man.
DIRECTOR: Eli Roth; CAST: Ari Millen, Benjamin Byron Davis, Eli Roth, Karen Cliche, Dylan Hawco; DISTRIBUTOR: The Horror Section; IN THEATERS: August 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 26 min.
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