‘Ice Cream Man’ Review: Eli Roth’s Gruesome Gore-Fe

If you’re looking up the credits for Ice Cream Man on IMDB, you might as well skip past director/co-screenwriter Eli Roth and the extensive cast list. Because the real stars of this ultra-gonzo horror film are the folks in the makeup department, especially prosthetics designers Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot (the latter an Oscar winner for his work on The Whale). Sure, Roth came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay. But his efforts would have been for naught if you didn’t fully believe the sights of young children dismembering their parents’ bodies or playing games of tetherball and tag with human heads. Not to mention the tug of war using human intestines.

If all of that sounds like a euphoric cinematic experience, then this the film for you. It’s certainly the film for its auteur, who conceived the idea more than two decades ago and has been trying to make it ever since. Since the major studios passed on his idea about a townful of kids turned into crazed, murderous zombies, Roth formed his own company, The Horror Section, to distribute his labor of love. Not surprisingly, the film is being released unrated.

The film doesn’t feature a particularly complicated scenario. The strange-looking driver of a weirdly decorated ice cream truck driving through the sort of idyllic American small town painted by Norman Rockwell distributes his frozen wares to the local children, and they promptly turn into homicidal little creatures staring blankly into space and sporting severely discolored lips. They go after their adult prey with such demonic enthusiasm it makes you wonder why George Romero never thought of the idea, a sort of “Bugsy Malone of the Living Dead.”

One hopes Roth has gotten his worst instincts out with this effort, which, considering that it comes from the maker of such films as Cabin Fever, Hostel and Thanksgiving, is saying something.

The silent, perpetually smiling ice cream truck vendor, played chillingly by Canadian actor Ari Millen (Orphan Black), is certainly a creepy figure who could give Art the Clown in the Terrifier movies a run for his money. Except that the Ice Cream Man is less a psycho killer than an evil enabler, one whose frozen treats turn otherwise normal children into pint-sized killing machines displaying remarkable ingenuity in their methods of slaughter. The Ice Cream Man does pitch in at times, including serving a teacher’s scooped-out brains to him in a cone.

The little darlings, who include a girl who walks around the neighborhood holding her mother’s severed head like a trophy, display the usual playfulness of summer campers. They also seek to swell their ranks by force-feeding the ice cream to any fellow children who haven’t yet been infected. Their carnage — exemplified in a lengthy, virtuosic sequence in which they attack the adult teachers and employees at their grade school with frenzied abandon — includes the sort of gruesome playground activities involving severed body parts that makes one hope the child actors had recourse to on-set psychiatric counseling.

There’s a backstory of sorts, told by a local priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) and involving a travesty of justice followed by revenge facilitated by a necromancer. But it almost seems unnecessary, since the film’s true raison d’etre is demonstrating the amazing talents of its prosthetics designers, who have created such a relentless series of horrific bodily images that it’s easy to imagine blood-crazed audiences applauding them like musical numbers. The reliance on practical effects rather than the CGI employed by so many current horror films at least proves refreshing.

The visuals are also packed with throwaway jokes, including one drive-by decapitation that should be accompanied by a rim shot, and deadpan visual flourishes like a crow pecking out the eyes of a corpse in the foreground of a shot.

There have been plenty of horror movies involving murderous children over the years, such as Village of the Damned and its sequel and, of course, Children of the Corn. But Roth doesn’t hide his desire to outdo them all with this effort that can only be described as sick and twisted. And I’m sure he’ll take that as a compliment.