Ice Cream Man (2026) – Review

Quick Thoughts:

• It’s fun that director Eli Roth studied Saving Private Ryan while planning to film rampaging kids.
• Kiori Mirza Waldman, Charlie Zeltzer, and Shiloh O’ Reilly are solid.
• After watching a child saw off their parent’s head with a hacksaw, the rest of the bloody carnage is a bit monotonous.
• The film makes more sense when you learn that Roth made it for kids.
• Grade – 4 Evil Ice Cream Sandwiches out of 10.

Shot in 19 days during a Toronto summer, Ice Cream Man is a 20-year-in-the-making passion project from director Eli Roth. After almost 20 years of studios telling Roth that his “Pied Piper meets The Birds” splatterfest was commercially unfeasible, Roth started up an indie studio named The Horror Section so he could exorcise the idea from his head. It’s admirable that he chased his dream, but the result is loaded with too many scoops of plot cream which build towards a monotonous and unwieldy experience.

Ice Cream Man revolves around what happens when a mysterious ice cream man (Ari Millen) sells hundreds of frozen “treats” to the children of Bayleen Bay, an idyllic coastal town that will soon become a warzone. The frozen treats turn the children into homicidal maniacs who kill their parents and then spread throughout the town to kill the remaining adults. Amidst the carnage, it’s up to middle schoolers Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) to save the town with the help of Jared’s sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott – who has a fun but unnecessary Wolf of Wall Street-esque moment).

In the press notes, star Ari Millen describes the film as “Home Alone meets 28 Days Later,” and he’s not wrong because it features rampaging children inflicting creative pain on dozens of adults. Roth came up with the idea while dreaming, and the most memorable visual was children playing jump rope with intestines. So, he dreamt about children murdering adults, and then had to reverse-engineer the scenario to explain why the kids ripped open an adult’s midsection, pulled out their intestines, and then used them as a jump rope. The explanation shouldn’t be spoiled, but it involves town secrets, churches, and a school attack sequence involving 100+ children.

Fueled by high-key lighting and a hot August sun, the colorful-looking film goes hard on daylight horror, and had to happen so Roth could film with middle-school-aged kids. The nostalgic look is supposed to stand in opposition to the unrated violence involving bricks, shovels, garbage disposals, pencils, and hacksaws. However, the bright lights showcase Roth’s stretched ambition (you can’t hide anything in daylight). Roth wanted the film to feel like a fairy tale, but most fairy tales are fairly easy to explain and don’t need a bit about how hard it will be to defeat the Ice Cream Man. When you get into the plot mechanics of Ice Cream Man, it’s all a bunch of hooey, and they were clearly created around the initial ideas that Roth had 20 years ago. The biggest problem with building a 100-minute film around a feverish dream is that the elements don’t always fit organically. After directing for over 20 years, Roth knows his way around a successful production (Thanksgiving is a hoot), so it’s a surprise that he didn’t tighten the script to dedicate more attention to the seemingly simple premise.

It’s also worth noting that the majority of the townsfolk and students are terrible people before the evil ice cream is introduced. So, when the killing starts, nobody cares about the carnage because there are zero feelings involved when a person is attached to an ambulance and dragged through the street. The idea of Roth crafting a “Stand by Me” featuring deadly ice cream is fun, but the production was too rushed and stretched to do anything other than shoot really quickly. It’s neat that Roth was able to get this idea out of his head, and it will be fun to see what original idea he tackles next (or makes another Thanksgiving film).