Ice Cream Man (2026)

Ice Cream Man is a morally repugnant mess. It masquerades as a high-concept slasher when it is nothing more than an AI-infested excuse for Eli Roth to amplify his kink for extreme violence. If you’re looking for the next Art the Clown from Terrifier, prepare to be both disgusted and disappointed. With writing, performances, humour, and direction this bad, it won’t come as a surprise when it competes with Citizen Vigilante for the worst film of the year. 

The premise of Ice Cream Man, a soft remake of the 1995 direct-to-video slasher of the same name, had mild promise. A mysterious, silent Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen) starts driving through an idyllic suburban town, serving all the children in the area free scoops of ice cream. When the children go to bed that night, the sweet treats in their bellies rapidly turn them into homicidal maniacs, terrorising the streets and killing any adult they can find. By the time the merciless killings begin, it’s hard not to think you’re watching a pulpier rip-off of last year’s Weapons.

A flimsy prologue with lead kid Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), his teen sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott), and their parents Marty (Eli Roth) and Alison (Karen Cliche) poorly introduces a family the audience finds little reason to care for. Everyone is giving stunted and wooden performances, not helped by a screenplay that feels heavily doctored by AI interference. Painfully dated jokes filled with racism and body shaming are riddled throughout the script – one, delivered by Roth himself, effectively turns paedophilia into a cheap laugh.

In a year of horror that has been full of unique and boundary-breaking films—Backrooms, Obsession, Leviticus, and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple—Ice Cream Man is not only generic but agonisingly tacky. Children suddenly have more strength than any adult on screen, while any logical explanation for the Ice Cream Man’s motivations is undone by astonishingly trite mythology. Every excessive kill tries to one-up the last, making its 86-minute runtime feel like an excruciating endurance test. The less said about its tone-deaf, hackneyed ending, the better. 

The most offensive element of the entire piece, other than looking into Eli Roth’s comments about Greta Thunberg, is how much Ice Cream Man relies on generative AI for its visual effects. Once the film reaches its boneheaded backstory of its titular villain, animated flashbacks reveal a heinous montage that might set the record for the most blatant use of AI slop ever seen in a major motion picture. Many of the exterior shots are also a complete eyesore, akin to asking Meta to make an AI image of mayhem unfolding in the background of a small town. If this was a shortcut to save on the film’s budget, Roth could not have taken a more dishonest route.

The only element of Ice Cream Man worthy of even the slightest praise is the practical gore used in many of the kills. One sequence involving a brain and an ice cream scooper is notably squeamish. These moments however are further undone by Roth’s aimless direction—the plight of Jared and his friends to take down the Ice Cream Man is equal parts unwatchable, cruel, and narratively inept. Gore has its place in horror, but the violence inflicted here comes across as nothing more than the lowest-common-denominator levels of shock.

Ice Cream Man is the Neapolitan of horror filmmaking. Three flavours of AI-ridden dreck: dreadful direction, wretched writing, and plodding performances. Eli Roth thinks he can entertain his audience with bloody spectacle and punch-down humour, but he has achieved nothing more than a double scoop of vapid, uncomfortable boredom. With any luck, the film will melt away in the sun.