Review: Eli Roth’s ‘Ice Cream Man’ Is an Extreme Slasher Purely for Hardcore Gorehounds
According to CinemaDrame News Agency, film critic Sophie Harrison wrote in an exclusive review: If you look up the IMDb entry for Ice Cream Man, you could easily skip right past Eli Roth as director and co-writer, as well as the long cast list. The true stars of this violently extreme splatter film are special makeup effects and prosthetics designers Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot (an Oscar winner for The Whale). While Roth conceived the story and penned the screenplay with Noah Binson, all his directorial efforts would amount to little without the terrifyingly believable imagery of children butchering their parents, or playing tetherball and hide-and-seek with severed human heads—with a rope fashioned from human intestines thrown in for good measure.
If all of that sounds like a fun night at the movies, then this film was tailored specifically for you. It is unabashedly a passion project for Roth himself, who first conceived the idea more than two decades ago and has been trying to make it ever since. After major Hollywood studios repeatedly turned down his pitch about a town overrun by killer child zombies, Roth founded his independent outfit, The Horror Section, to produce and distribute this unrated, completely uninhibited personal project.
The narrative itself is straightforward. The eccentric driver of a devilishly decorated ice cream truck pulls into a quiet, idyllic American town, distributing frozen treats to young children. The kids quickly transform—their lips discolored, their eyes glazed over into vacant stares—into bloodthirsty killers. They turn on the town’s parents and adults with a demonic fervor reminiscent of George A. Romero’s classic zombie cinema, albeit dialed up to an extraordinarily graphic extreme.
The quiet, perpetually smiling truck driver—brought to life by a chillingly cold performance from Ari Millen (Orphan Black)—presents a villainous presence capable of rivaling Art the Clown from the Terrifier franchise. Yet rather than serving as a direct slasher himself, he acts primarily as a sinister catalyst, turning ordinary children into pint-sized killing machines with wildly creative methods of murder. Naturally, the Ice Cream Man gets his own hands dirty on occasion, such as in a sequence where he scoops out a teacher’s brain and serves it back to her in a waffle cone.
The young children in the film—including a little girl who proudly parades her mother’s severed head through the neighborhood like a trophy—display a brand of madness and macabre humor. They also actively work to expand their ranks by force-feeding the corrupted ice cream to their peers. Their carnage climaxes in an extended, technically ambitious sequence set at an elementary school, where they attack teachers using playground equipment and dismembered limbs.
Throughout the narrative, a vague backstory involving revenge and witchcraft is delivered by a local priest (played by Benjamin Byron Davis), though this subplot feels largely superfluous. The film’s true raison d’être is showcasing the makeup department’s remarkable talent for crafting stomach-churning, gore-drenched practical effects. The commitment to physical, practical gore over the CGI that dominates modern horror stands as a distinct high point for genre enthusiasts.
While cinema has seen its share of killer-kid horror films—from Village of the Damned to Children of the Corn—Eli Roth holds nothing back here, delivering a thoroughly transgressively sick vision that eclipses them all.
Directed by Eli Roth, Ice Cream Man stars Ari Millen, Benjamin Byron Davis, Eli Roth, Karen Cliche, Dylan Haegens, Sarah Abbott, and Shiloh O’Reilly. The film opened in theaters on Friday, August 7, 2026.
