Ice Cream Man review: Gore galore but little more in this clunky chiller

There's nothing of any substance in this extreme horror flick from Eli Roth about a killer that seems like Art the Clown in disguise.

A creepy-looking ice cream man with pale skin and a wide smile, wearing an all-white uniform with a red bow-tie, smiles while holding a tray of treats around a group of children.

The Horror Section

Published: Thursday, 6 August 2026 at 10:26 am

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A star rating of 2 out of 5.

There’s gore galore but little more in director/co-writer Eli Roth’s cheap, video nasty-informed shocker that mistakes endless bloodletting for entertainment. This is the first movie that Roth has directed for The Horror Section, a media company he founded to provide a market for unapologetically extreme splatter flicks, such as those that made him famous (namely Cabin Fever and Hostel).

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However, this mix of Children of the Damned, Weapons and 1970s Italian cannibal movies is a clunky cartoon chiller, advertised in the opening credits as being in "Scream–O-Vision" but, in reality, is flakier than that chocolate stick in your over-priced 99.

In the film, a creepily mute ice cream man (Ari Millen) drives his musical van into the suburban coastal enclave of Bayleen Bay selling an array of frozen treats to the local school children (brand names include Locust Lick and Creepy Crawly). Pretty soon the kids' lips are encrusted with Day-Glo sprinkles from the cursed cones as they transform into a feral swarm of brainwashed zombies hellbent on killing their friends and family in ever more savage ways.

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Bullied 12-year-old Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) is lactose-intolerant, which means he isn’t infected alongside his classmates, and eventually he joins up with his sassy older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and her besotted boyfriend Chris (Dylan Hawco) to make sense of what’s going on.

This motley crew take refuge in the church where the lame Freddy Krueger-style backstory is told by a freezer-imprisoned local priest (Benjamin Byron Davis). He snaps the wayward narrative into fuzzy supernatural focus and sets in motion the downbeat Necromancer ending in which Roth (multi-tasking by also playing Jared’s lawyer dad) ensures you know he really is the only head to blame for this mess in constant meltdown.

With fan-friendly nods to Dario Argento’s Deep Red, Stephen King’s IT, composer Ennio Morricone and the more recent Terrifier franchise (the Ice Cream Man really is Art the Clown in disguise), the only homage that truly works is the one lifted from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, whereby the children amass on a playground climbing frame before a frenzied attack.

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Elsewhere, the jokey humour is leaden and perfunctory, and you can only have so many teachers/parents arrive on the scene in bewilderment, and admonish the clearly demented assembly, before being slaughtered in ever more old-fashioned Cannibal Holocaust ways.

While the pedestrian acting isn’t up to scratch, the work of prosthetics designers Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot (the latter an Oscar winner for The Whale) certainly is. The top-notch gruesome visuals are sure to sate the horror hardcore, including a dismemberment with hacksaw, head-severing, entrail tug-of-war, eye-gouging by microscope, intestines used as skipping ropes, cats cradling with guts and, best of all, cranium removal so brains can be scooped into cones.

That really is all there is, though, in this not-so-Grand Guignol that dethrones Roth as the king of far edgier delights. There’s nothing of any substance here and, in the limited sub-genre of psycho youngsters, Cooties, Devil Times Five and The Children did it way better. Sadly, no one will be screaming for Ice Cream Man.

Ice Cream Man is released in UK cinemas on Friday 7 Auust.

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Authors

Alan Jones

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