Running Time: 86 minutes
This film from The Horror Section opens exclusively at cinemas on August 7th, 2026.
Over the years, there have been plenty of horror pictures about murderous youngsters, from The Bad Seed to Children of the Corn and The Children (which is a particularly disturbing personal favorite). We’ve also seen a few titles about sociopathic ice cream sellers and tainted products like The Stuff and, well, a 1995 feature with the very same moniker as the picture arriving this week. Ice Cream Man is an incredibly graphic genre film blended with dark comedy. It offers some grisly laughs and a couple of memorable sequences, but the story doesn’t appear to have been fully churned for maximum flavor.
The film opens with young Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) fumbling his way through a ball game. He’s berated by bullies and even friends, but finds respite with the arrival of The Ice Cream Man (Ari Millen). The smiling figure offers very odd frozen treats on his menu (although when he serves the items, they all just look like ordinary cones), and is immediately surrounded by children. Alas, Jared is lactose intolerant and returns home with his sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) while the others gulp their desserts down. That ends up being a good thing, as the ice cream turns all the young tots into blank-faced killers. They slaughter every adult in their path, and attempt to force ice cream down the throat of any child who hasn’t consumed it. Jared, Lizzie and a few other youngsters attempt to find out what’s happening and stop the villainous salesman.
The prime selling point here is the nasty ways in which the kids turn on adults and slay them. There are some remarkably outrageous and painful-looking deaths, particularly when the schoolkids go on a rampage during class. One memorable bit involves an ice cream scoop being used in a bizarre manner to serve up a stomach-churning cone. The adult cast members do their best to play the humor up, adding a fearful comment with a wink as their icy ends occur. There are also some amusing shots amidst the chaos of kids on the playground running around and playing with body parts.
And it’s also fun to see a horror picture that is set entirely during the day. It certainly doesn’t make for a scary or menacing backdrop, but the fact that these horrible events are occurring under bright, natural light adds a dose of dark humor to the proceedings. It also allows the cinematography to showcase several impressive make-up effects.
As noted, some of the set pieces are fun, but unfortunately the picture doesn’t offer much more and quickly begins to feel repetitive. There are three main sections to the story, with the cold-blooded killers running riot through suburbia, then their school, and eventually at a local cemetery. As you can tell by reading the plot summary, the story is slim and leaves its leads with little to do but watch the horrors occurring around them and hide. Jared and the other protagonists don’t have character arcs or change over the course of the film. They simply run around and go on a bit of a goose chase for eighty-minutes.
And all the adults in the picture are presented as buffoons. In fact, they are so unobservant that it becomes irritating rather than amusing. Even when others around them are being slaughtered, they seem dimly unaware of what’s occurring. As for the titular villain, he isn’t well-developed nor does he possess an interesting backstory. The Ice Cream Man barely speaks, and beyond peering through a window or two, rarely interacts with the protagonists. When ultimately revealed, his bland history is clearly cribbed from other horror franchise icons.
While I appreciated the attempts to present some nasty attack scenes and even chuckled here and there by the geysers of blood spraying across the screen, beyond that there isn’t much flavor to this chiller. The story is bare bones, and because all the characters are caricatures, there’s no real threat or excitement in how the events will play out. In the end, Ice Cream Man isn’t as much of a horrifying treat as hoped for, nor is it as tasty as similarly-themed genre film efforts.
