Crew
Director/Story – Eli Roth, Screenplay – Noah Belson & Eli Roth, Producers – Kate Harrison Karman, Eli Roth, Raj B. Singh & Christopher Woodrow, Photography – Simon Shohet, Music – Brandon Roberts, Additional Music – Snoop Dogg, Visual Effects – Declan Boyle, Dark Half, Invalid Symbol (Supervisor – J. Lee Williams) & Kill Josh Petrino, Special Effects Supervisors – Max MacDonald & Melinda Ramsey, Prosthetic & Makeup Effects – Applied Arts FX Studio, Makeup Effects – Morot FX, Production Design – Peter Mihaichuk. Production Company – The Horror Section.
Cast
Charlie Zeltzer (Jared Mayfair), Kiora Mirza Waldman (Mia), Shiloh O’Reilly (Tommy Green), Ari Millen (The Ice Cream Man), Sarah Abbott (Lizzie Mayfair), Dylan Hawco (Chris), Benjamin Byron Davis (The Priest), Eli Roth (Marty Mayfair), Karen Cliché (Alison Mayfair), Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll (Mr Hamlin), Ken Hall (Mr Browning), Ric Reid (Roger), Luke Dietz (Elliot Henderson), Amanda Barker (Mrs Henderson), Sonam Kalsang (Sebastian), Darrin Baker (Principal Maloney), Charlie Storey (Piper Farber), Ivano DiCaro (Hank), Ryan Allen (Officer Salinger)
Plot
In the town of Bayleen Bay, an ice cream truck appears after a Little League game in and all of the kids flock to buy one. Jared Mayfair doesn’t due to being lactose intolerant. That night, Jared hears the jingle of the ice cream passing through the neighbourhood. This affects everybody who had eaten an ice cream whereupon they turn and kill their parents. Jared goes to school the next day and notices the rest of the children all sitting in a blank, unspeaking state. After the reappearance of the ice cream man, the children turn and begin slaughtering the teachers. Jared and a couple of other unaffected children try to flee to safety and find a way to stop the ice cream man.
Eli Roth has been a major name in horror genre ever since his first film Cabin Fever (2002). The film that placed Roth’s name on the map was Hostel (2005), which pushed screen sadism and torture to gruesome extremes. Since then, Roth has made the likes of Hostel Part II (2007), The Green Inferno (2013), Knock Knock (2015), the remake of Death Wish (2018), a children’s film The House With a Clock in Its Walls (2018), the slasher film Thanksgiving (2025) and the videogame adaptation Borderlands (2024).
It should be made clear upfront that Ice Cream Man is unrelated to the earlier Ice Cream Man (1995), which starred Clint Howard as a psychopathic ice cream man who abducted kids and turned them into his product. In this era of remakes, reboots and reimaginings, you kind of expected that this was another revival. If there is an earlier film that Ice Cream Man comes closest to it is probably Cooties (2014) where schoolchildren are abruptly turned into zombies.
As Ice Cream Man starts, it plays out as a typical childhood film set around Little League games, bickering parents, kids dealing with bullies. This is the way the film goes for about the first seventeen minutes where about the only difference from standard is some smartly sarcastic dialogue from Roth and co-writer Noah Belson. Then we get a series of scenes where children suddenly wake up and off their parents – one little girl (Charlie Storey) walks in and saws her mother’s head off (and is then seen walking about with it throughout), while her brother batters the father’s head in with a baseball bat; a dentist has a mousetrap placed on his toes and drills shoved in his ear by his children; another father is lured to put his hand in the kitchen disposal before it is turned on and he is then set on fire.
Eli Roth has always had a love of splatter and gore – this is the man for whose films the term Torture Porn was coined – and Ice Cream Man sees him back in the gleeful Horror Comedy vein of his earlier Cabin Fever. Roth fully reaches his stride when the film arrives at the high school and Roth lets go with everything in his arsenal with a fiendish glee. Here we get an assortment of scenes with kids going amok impaling teachers’ heads into the eyepieces of a lab microscope; another teacher held down in the hallway and run over by a bicycle and then cut in two with an axe; the principal’s bald head peeled open with an electric knife whereupon his brains are scooped out and placed into an ice cream cone; we see splattered brains merged with children’s chalk in a pretty painting on the pavement. In the playground, we see children potting hoops with severed heads, using intestines as skipping ropes or on a seesaw which rises up and down on decapitated bodies. The kind of imagination behind all of this is positively fiendish.
Roth also casts himself as the smoothly unctuous, conservative-coded parent with a smarminess that you love to hate (along with Karen Cliché as his wife). The climax of the film even serves us Roth’s own severed head. There is a cursory explanation involving curses and resurrected souls, but the film doesn’t much need those. It’s a shame that the film met a middling box-office and critical reception as you feel that there is something to Ice Cream Man that could easily have been built out into a series.
Eli Roth has also produced the splatter comedy 2001 Maniacs (2005), The Last Exorcism (2010), The Last Exorcism Part II (2013), The Sacrament (2013), Clown (2014), The Stranger (2014), The Man with the Iron Fists 2 (2015) and Haunt (2019), plus the tv series Hemlock Grove (2013-5), wrote/produced the martial arts film The Man with the Iron Fists (2012), Aftershock (2012), the remake of Cabin Fever (2016), the anthology tv series’ The Haunted Museum (2021-3) and Urban Legend (2022), the animated tv series Fright Krewe (2023-4), the tv series The Faceless Lady (2024), Jimmy and Stiggs (2024) and Dream Eater (2025), as well as directed one of the fake trailers for Grindhouse (2007). Roth also makes cameos and acting appearance in a number of films, including most of the abovementioned, Don’t Look Up (2009), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Piranha (2010) and Death Rider in the House of Vampires (2021).
Trailer here