By Peg Aloi

Eli Roth’s brightly packaged slasher has an intriguing premise, sweet candy-colored visuals, and impressive effects, but its lazy derivations, forced humor, and AI-generated cartoons leave a sour aftertaste.

Ice Cream Man, directed by Eli Roth. Screening at Showcase SuperLux Chestnut Hill, AMC Boston Common 19, AMC Causeway 13, and other cinemas around New England.

Ari Millen in a scene from Ice Cream Man. Photo: Valerie Flores/The Horror Section

Ice Cream Man sets out to be an aesthetically intriguing summer-vacation slasher full of suburban kids run amok. But its potential appeal for horror buffs is undercut by weak dialogue and forced humor that tries too hard to be edgy. I am not a fan of contemporary horror that relies on gratuitous gore and violence for impact, but I was drawn to the campy premise of Eli Roth’s film, especially the dreamy, somewhat surreal visuals in the film’s trailers.

Roth’s previous films include a number of violent horror pictures, including the hiker slasher Hostel (2004) and the 2018 remake of Death Wish, the 1974 revenge thriller starring Charles Bronson. Ice Cream Man begins with that quintessential summer event: a softball game between two opposing high school teams. Both sides have their share of requisite stereotypes, including beefy bullies, cute jocks, math geeks, and spoiled coaches’ sons who get away with vile behavior. Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) is a skinny, smart-alecky kid; he is not the greatest athlete, but is good-natured, well-liked, and able to hold his own when bullies harass him.

After the game, the coach of the winning team offers to buy all the players from both teams ice cream from a colorful truck that drives by. Other kids who were at the game join them. The ice cream man appears to be in his early 40s and looks as if he could be the love child of John Waters and Marcel Marceau: i.e., he is skinny, white, neatly dressed, sports a creepy mustache, effeminate, and never says a word as he smiles widely and hands out cold, creamy treats.

Jared notices that the names of the treats are odd — they include words like “swamp,” “creepy,” and “slimy,” accompanied by pictures of bugs. He refuses a free ice cream because, he explains, he is lactose intolerant. (It is important that we understand that several kids, like Jared, have not partaken of the ice-cream feast.) His older sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), the object of many crushes among his peers, comes to pick him up, and on the ride home they see cheerleader Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) vomiting by the side of the road. Is she sick? She later makes a wry joke about how all 12-year-old girls know how to make themselves throw up: a rather glib and disturbing reference to eating disorders, as is the character’s name (Ana/Mia being a term for online communities of people with anorexia and bulimia).

At dinner that night, Jared’s parents, Marty (Roth) and Alison (Karen Cliché), are pushing Lizzie to go to law school like her father and grandfather did. At this point the film’s weaknesses become more noticeable: awkward dialogue, riddled with forced humor, that tries too hard to be edgy. In this clunky expository scene, we get a sense of foreshadowing in the offhand fact of Jared coming from a family of lawyers. The dinner-table banter establishes Jared’s hopelessly normal home life — before it is, predictably, torn asunder.

Jared notices that the names of the treats are odd — there’s “swamp,” “creepy,” and “slimy,” accompanied by pictures of bugs. He refuses a free ice cream because, he explains, he is lactose intolerant. (It is important that we understand that several kids, like Jared, have not partaken of the ice-cream feast.) His older sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), the object of many crushes among his peers, comes to pick him up, and on the ride home they see cheerleader Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) vomiting by the side of the road. Is she sick? She later makes a wry joke about how all 12-year-old girls know how to make themselves throw up.

The next morning, as Jared bikes to school, he sees a number of classmates with colorful stains and dried-up sprinkles around their mouths. They are acting strangely. Wearing blank expressions, they shuffle their feet, move slowly, and do not speak. At school, Jared, Mia, and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) are the only kids we see acting normally. For some reason, their friends are ignoring them. The teachers become fed up with the weird behavior and assume that the kids are all in on some joke.

Then all hell breaks loose. The mesmerized kids start attacking teachers, and later their parents, with whatever makeshift weapons they can find. Gruesome wounds and a trail of mutilated bodies are left in their wake as they take over the school and terrorize the town. The kids morph from catatonic zombies into laughing, screaming murder machines. When they suddenly shake off their entranced stupor, and start running, flailing, and shouting, viewers may be reminded of the wonderful climactic scene in Zach Cregger’s recent horror hit Weapons, in which several dozen children who have been imprisoned in a basement suddenly sprint madly through their neighborhood, breaking a fuck ton of windows. The action is inexplicable and insane — but it is thrilling and unforgettable.

And yet, despite being inspired by some good influences, Roth can’t quite make this mess work. Overall, Ice Cream Man is poorly put together and lazily derivative. There are strong design elements: the bright colors and nostalgic atmosphere at the opening are quite striking. But the story elements feel patched together. For example, before the mayhem begins, Jared notices that his phone is playing an odd cartoon: an old-timey, Fleischer-style animation of kids and an ice cream truck. These visuals are reminiscent of the sing-song television content that is watched compulsively by kids in Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). But in Ice Cream Man these visuals are never properly explained or contextualized.

On top of that, Roth’s use of generative AI to create these video segments has also come under fire on social media. In an interview with Polygon, he initially stated that he had drawn the cartoons himself, then had to issue a correction acknowledging that he had used AI. Unsurprisingly, this confession has made many critics and viewers see red — myself included.

Speaking of seeing red, this is just about the goriest and most violent horror film I have seen in quite a long time. The special effects are very well done; for those who like this kind of thing, there is plenty to like. Ice Cream Man has the potential to become a cult film for people who want to get high, eat a bunch of frozen confections, and laugh themselves silly while screaming at relentless scenes of brutality.

As for what the heck is going on, the explanation for why the ice cream man turned evil is contrived and confusing, a kind of incoherence that resembles that of other revenge-driven slasher films. The ice cream man himself is depressingly two-dimensional, despite being played by an actor known for his chameleon-like abilities — Orphan Black’s Ari Millen. Overall, the cast manages the silly dialogue well enough, but they cannot redeem the film’s fatal lack of originality, message center, or purpose.

I was hoping for a twist on that old Star Trek episode, “…And the Children Shall Lead,” which offers a profound tale of orphaned children who turn evil when manipulated by a cult-like mentor. In this case, however, the kids are merely hapless automatons, pumped full of sugar and forced to wreak bloody havoc for reasons neither they nor we understand. What might have been a wryly twisted commentary on disaffected youth (always a juicy horror trope) and the impact of bullying is instead a chaotic, ersatz gorefest, lacking taste and substance.

Peg Aloi is a former film critic for the Boston Phoenix and member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Alliance for Women Film Journalists. She taught film studies in Boston for over a decade. She has written on film, TV, and culture for web publications like Time, Vice, Polygon, Bustle, Dread Central, Mic, Orlando Weekly, Refinery29, and Bloody Disgusting. Her blog “The Witching Hour” can be found on substack.