Death Served with Sprinkles

Kids go crazy for the demoniac taste of ice cream in 2026's Ice Cream Man. It's an Eli Roth movie, maybe the most niche movie he's ever made. You really need to be into dark humour to enjoy this one and, considering nowadays people's idea of "dark" is the Robert Pattinson Batman movie or Dark Academia, it's no wonder this one didn't connect with audiences. You may ask, is this the whole reason the original Hostel movies were popular but this wasn't? The real difference is that Hostel worked as a straightforward horror movie while, for Ice Cream Man, you really need to be in on the joke, which is that straightforward horror movies are also, typically, ridiculous if you think about them. Anyway, I enjoyed Ice Cream Man but I didn't find the humour as sharp as what we see in Thanksgiving.

The film feels like a distant parody of Something Wicked This Way Comes. The movie opens on an idyllic afternoon of junior high school baseball. Our point of view character is the nerdy Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who fails to catch the fly ball that decides the game. A strange ice cream truck appears, operated by a smiling man in a bow tie (Ari Millen). Jared doesn't imbibe the evil ice cream because he's lactose intolerant. He watches helplessly as most of his classmates are transformed into gleeful murderers the next day. He teams up with Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), who threw up the ice cream because she's bulimic, and the delinquent Tommy (Shiloh O'Reilly). The three try to survive as mayhem descends on their school.

It felt a little like Roth was trying to school Zach Creegor and show him how you really make a movie about weaponised children. It's like Roth wrote up a list of one hundred ways kids can kill their parents. They range from the relatively plausible to the appreciably bizarre. One man is scalped and fed his own brains in an ice cream cone, one man has popsicle sticks crammed into every orifice. This is all stuff from the real fan of '70s and '80s horror, both relatively mainstream stuff like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies or the more obscure cult classics, like Cannibal Holocaust.

Over the course of the film, Roth develops the relationships between the characters. I particularly enjoyed the progression of Jared's high school student sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), who's forced to reunite with her ex-boyfriend (Dylan Hawco) amid the mayhem.

The movie concludes with a dedication to several people, including "Angelo and David", presumably Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. Most people associate Roth with Quentin Tarantino but he also worked with Lynch early on. There's a very lucky man.