Director: Eli Roth
Cast: Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Sarah Abbott, Benjamin Byron Davis
Screenplay: Eli Roth, Noah Belson
86 mins. Not Rated.

Eli Roth (Thanksgiving) clearly grew up a fan of the exploitation and grindhousian style of cinema. It’s influences run across his entire career, and it’s led him to high-highs with Hostel Part II and low-lows like Knock Knock, but the style is bursting with this mean-spirited, destined-to-be-a-cult-classic energy. Nowhere is that more clear than his newest film, a fascinating play off the killer kid subgenre with plenty of meanness and some inspired levels of violence that unfortunately suffers from a screenplay that lacks characterization, confidence in the material, and an ending that is both expected and truly dull.

Jared (Charlie Zeltzer, White Lie) lives in a small idyllic town in the midst of a hot summer, and when a mysterious ice cream truck makes its way around, offering delicious sweet treats to the neighborhood, he’s seemingly one of the few children who misses out. Lucky him, though, because this ice cream causes the children to turn into psychotic little monsters hellbent of dispatching their parents and anyone else who gets in their way. Now, he has to team up with a few select students at school who weren’t turned in order to dispatch the Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen, undertone) before the town’s remaining residents are wiped out.

Ice Cream Man has an intriguing take on the classic Pied Piper tale, and Roth leads with his best ideas and a fascinating villain. The gore is splattery and the deaths are malicious and mean and really match his grindhousian ideals. I really liked the Ice Cream Man’s song, which populates on phones and announces that it’s time to murder, but it’s also indicative of the movie’s largest problem: Ice Cream Man’s best toppings are all thrown together with no rhyme or reason and very little meaning. There’s a ludicrous explanation given for his existence about an hour in that I actually kind of loved, but it’s not executed well, giving most of the exposition to a character just hanging out waiting for the right main character to explain it all to, and yet very little attention is given to the song and the truck and the ice cream and what happens to the children. Through it all, I still wanted to love this thing, but the cobbled-together ending feels too obvious and completely underwhelming at the same time. There’s a kernel of a great movie in all this, but it feels undercooked or, perhaps in this case, a little melted.

Still, though, I feel as though Ice Cream Man has potential to be the next great midnight movie, a cult classic in the making. After all, most of the attention is given to the splattery effects, which are excellent. I felt like I had discovered this thing on one of the overnight channels when I was a kid, a movie that isn’t necessarily good, but it also didn’t have me wanting to change the channel. Roth’s characters and writing are thin here, but they are also more watchable than most of the characters from Cabin Fever and the first Hostel movie. The humor is crass but sometimes quite funny, and Ari Millen’s titular villain is creepy, silent, and consistently unnerving. I just wish this screenplay had a few more drafts and characters that were either more likable or far more interesting. When the twists and turns start building late in the film, it all felt so silly but in a good way, like something that would’ve been turned out in a late 70s exploitation horror. Roth made an okay midnight movie that has the potential of an all-timer.

Ice Cream Man is probably going to piss off more people than not, and my frustrations all stem from the fact that I know Eli Roth is a very capable and learned filmmaker who wears his inspirations on his sleeves. He just made a few poor choices here in the narrative department, perhaps in service of those very inspirations, but he’s capable of doing better. Hostel Part II, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving all prove that Eli Roth can elevate his material above the inspiration while still enjoying the inherent goofiness of those inspirations, and this one misses the mark. He made an ice cream sundae overflowing with ingredients, but he left his screenplay outside to melt. There are ideas that could make a better sequel, but I’m just disappointed he couldn’t make it work this time.

2½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

• For more Eli Roth: Cabin Fever, The House with a Clock in its Walls

Ice Cream Man will be in Theaters Nationwide on August 7, 2026.