Let’s get one thing straight: beat for beat, Ice Cream Man is the single worst movie we’ve seen in a long time. Nothing even comes close. On paper, the premise is simple: an ice cream man turns kids into zombie-like murderers. You’d think this is the kind of premise easily fleshed out and expanded upon, and yet Eli Roth still manages to screw up the bare minimum by adding an unresolved necromancer storyline as context for the titular character’s demonic actions.
The acting from every single person in this film is horrendously poor (Ari Millen’s ice cream man is mute, which might be for the better), with shoddy writing and multiple AI generated sequences serving as the only real horror in this 90 minute display of senseless violence and gore for the sake of gore.
In a year which has been so strong for horror (Backrooms, Obsession, Hokum), Ice Cream Man is a stain on the genre. Eli Roth is a stain on the genre, so it’s no wonder that he had to start his own media company in order to even get this disaster made.
The bar for Ice Cream Man was already in hell, and unfortunately that is also where it stays. The ice cream truck in the movie should have had Golden Raspberry as a flavour, because the Razzie’s is where it belongs.
