Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Eli Roth
Starring: Ari Millen, Benjamin Byron Davis, Karen Cliche, Dylan Hawco, Sarah Abbott
Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man isn't a remake of the campy 1995 Clint Howard-headlined horror comedy with which it shares its title, but it does have the same basic starting point of a sinister ice cream vendor using his position to prey on the children of a suburb. Howard was simply abducting and killing the kids, but the ice cream man played by Ari Millen here transforms the brats into mindless zombies who turn violently against the adults of their New England town.
All save for the nerdy Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who is lactose intolerant and thus can't have any ice cream; the bulimic Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), who vomited up her ice cream, as she does with all her food; and Tommy (Kiori Mirza Waldman), who apparently just wasn't feeling peckish. Along with Jared's teenage sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and her ex-boyfriend Chris (Dylan Hawco), it's up to these kids to save their town from going down the rocky road to Hell.
It's no surprise that once again we find horror fan Roth channelling his influences into his work in an obvious manner. This one draws heavily on '80s horror, Jared and his friends the unaffected mogwai while all the other kids become raging gremlins. Roth aims for the foul-mouthed trash talk of The Monster Squad, but his limp dialogue falls far short of Fred Dekker and Shane Black's smart script for that 1987 gem. It's a shame, as the young performers all have a degree of charisma that's let down by Roth's simple-minded script.
Elsewhere Roth nods to Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, Fulci's Zombie Flesheaters, Romero's Night of the Living Dead, and most egregiously of all, Hitchcock's The Birds. Each time Roth evoked another master of genre cinema I felt like Will Smith watching Chris Rock make jokes about his wife. The "homages" here are akin to those awful parody movies of Friedberg and Seltzer, basic references that trigger memories and make you wish you were watching a better movie. The Hitchcock riff is so poorly executed I found myself wondering if maybe Roth hadn't seen The Birds and was actually paying tribute to The Simpsons.
With a premise as simple as this it should be impossible to go wrong, yet somehow Roth has made this setup a chore to sit through. There's certainly plenty of bloodshed, which is no surprise, but there is none of the goofy invention Roth brought to his slasher homage Thanksgiving. It doesn't help that Roth employs the sort of annoying shaky-cam that audiences grew tired of over a decade ago. This is likely done to cover up some dodgy FX or appease the censors, but it gives the viewer brain freeze. In this post Terrifier/In a Violent Nature landscape, horror filmmakers need to work a lot harder than this to impress gorehounds with their splatstick shenanigans.
Ice Cream Man is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 7th.
