Ice Cream Man (2026)
Ice Cream Man plants a genuinely nasty idea in a Norman Rockwell postcard, and then seems to forget what to do with it. Eli Roth’s slasher is set in Bayleen Bay, an idyllic sort of town where a stranger in a novelty truck hands out cones that turn ordinary kids into giggling, gleeful killers. There’s a sharp little parable buried somewhere in that premise, something about the sweetness of suburbia masking the rot underneath childhood innocence. Roth finds it, briefly, for maybe ten minutes. Then he drops it for a parade of gore gags that repeat themselves until even the shock stops landing.
I kept waiting for the film to earn its own nastiness. It never quite does. A kid vomits blood mid-sentence and delivers a line so clearly built for screenshots and captions that I could almost see the algorithm behind it, rather than the child. The makeup department is having fun with melted, bloodied faces, credit where it’s due, but flat lighting and rushed editing flatten the effects into something cheap-looking, no matter how much red syrup gets flung at the lens. Ari Millen plays the title character with an unsettling stillness that the script never bothers using for anything beyond the next jump scare.
The adults fare no better. Karen Cliche and Benjamin Byron Davis wander through scenes of parental panic that never quite build into dread, mostly because the film keeps cutting away for another kill before a scene has had the chance to finish its own thought. Tonally, the film keeps changing its mind. One stretch reads as satire of moral panic, then it slides into straight creature-feature dread, then undercuts itself with a joke, and in my opinion none of these impulses survive long enough to add up to a coherent point of view.
By the time the truck rolls into its final act, I’d stopped flinching and started checking the time. A film about children turned monstrous ought to leave a mark. This one leaves a stain, and a fairly forgettable one at that, the kind a napkin wipes away without much bother.