One of the foundational pillars of horror is to take something childlike and twist it into something evil. We see this most often with murderous clowns, but possessed toys, demented animatronic mascots, even the occasional satanic board game have reared their heads in this regard in the past. Now, Eli Roth takes the wholesome activity of chasing after the ice cream truck and puts a madman behind the wheel. The out-of-tune warbling of the music is already only one degree removed from insanity, and Roth gleefully pushes it the rest of the way over that edge.

The fun to be derived from Roth’s Ice Cream Man – and it is considerable at points – is a function of the director’s commitment to high-impact practical gore. Gore that’s used here, as Roth most often uses it, for comedic effect. If you recall the torture scenes from Roth’s Hostel, or the gruesome behaviour of the natives in The Green Inferno, you’ll have some idea what this is going to look like, and indeed, it’s a lot less heavy than in those two films. Especially since it involves many child adjacent weapons that are turning the adults into so much pulpy goo.

The trouble is, the pulpy goo comes in hot and heavy right from the start, and then Ice Cream Man is content to sit at this level of undifferentiated gore for the final hour of its running time. Because it’s reached this crescendo prematurely, it leaves us impatient for some new dimension that never arrives.

It’s the last week of school before summer in the small New England town of Bayleen Bay, and the children are overcome with their expectations for the break ahead. They play baseball. They talk about skipping school to go to the amusement park. They bully each other or fall on the business end of the bullying.

And they go for ice cream, when that man with the slightly artificial grin and the old-timey paper hat and ice cream parlour get-up (Ari Millen) drives his truck up alongside their activities. All except Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who is lactose intolerant, and a few others who have managed to resist the truck’s warbling siren call for one reason or another. Jared’s older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) is planning the aforementioned day of playing hooky, but at least she’s honest about it at the dinner table with her mother (Karen Cliche) and father (Roth).

The last days of school may be sparsely attended, but they will also have a different vibe, because those kids who do show up have the foamy residue of ice cream and various sprinkles around their mouths, like a rabid dog who ate too much dairy. They’ve also got a zombie look in their eyes and don’t respond to direct questions. See, some of them woke up in the middle of the night in this state of unexplained possession and proceeded to kill their own parents in ways both brutally efficient and bizarrely creative. The teachers, and any other adults in the vicinity, may be next.

Even in a desensitised world, ultraviolence has not lost its impact if used suddenly and/or judiciously. And so it is we squirm with a mixture of horror and delight as a young girl with an ice cream sundae goatee systematically saws her own mother’s head off. Roth escalates our tendency to scream with laughter and disgust in a series of other increasingly complicated kills occurring around the same time of the night around town. (And yes, it’s one of a couple times you might think of Zach Cregger’s Weapons while watching Ice Cream Man.)

But where does Roth have to go from here? A shift in locales, but not a shift in the fundamental dynamics. There are a series of short build-ups to perverse kills of other adults around town as the hypnotised kids ransack the place they grew up. They do distinguish themselves in terms of what part of the body is sawed off or smashed in, and with what available blunt instrument or sharp tool. It’s possible to marvel at this creativity on a basic horror junkie level, while also longing for something with greater nourishment on a story level.

And that’s not going to come from the actual story. As a few immune teens and preteens gather, run away and try to make sense of their situation, we do get a supernatural explanation for what’s occurring and who’s behind it. However, there’s some topical subject matter slapped onto this that feels too dismissive by half, as Ice Cream Man is incapable of dealing with such an issue in the context of the horror silliness that predominates.

Then there are the tonal missteps. Roth seems to have some sense of his moral responsibility for this imagery, as the school is populated by an inordinate number of male teachers, possibly because an excessive amount of violence against women wouldn’t be appropriate. Then, undoing all those good intentions, he casts a person of colour to be involved in a dragging death behind a vehicle, which reads as particularly insensitive in light of several notorious incidents in the history of U.S. race relations.

You do really want to go with this movie. Roth is charming in his acting role, and the good time he’s having as a performer feels contagious. Also he’s got a real knack for setting the scene of Bayleen Bay, giving it a timeless, nostalgic feeling of small-town life, while never losing a sense of specificity in the writing.

The setup was also one of the strengths of his aforementioned torture porn film Hostel. It’s a long time before anything truly shocking happens in that movie, and before then it’s a believable tourist’s fever dream of a good-time trip through Europe. That sort of simmering gets to a boil too quickly in Ice Cream Man, and no amount of heads being smashed into pulpy goo can get us back to where we want to be in this film: actually shocked and surprised by sudden acts of brutality, and possibly laughing as a result.

 

Ice Cream Man opened yesterday in Australian cinemas.