Quit Throwing Money at Eli Roth!
Ice Cream Man — 0/5 Stars
There is a moment that occurs somewhere during the seemingly geological runtime of Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man when anger gives way to clarity.
You stop asking yourself why the movie is bad.
You stop wondering when it’s going to get better.
You stop making excuses for the people involved.
And suddenly, like a shaft of divine light breaking through the clouds, one thought presents itself with absolute crystalline certainty:
Maybe Eli Roth has always needed adult supervision.
Not studio support.
Not collaboration.
Not “creative partners.”
Intervention.
Because if Ice Cream Man represents Eli Roth finally enjoying the freedom to operate without some miserable studio executive periodically wandering onto the set and saying, “Eli, what the fuck are you doing?” then I would like to formally apologize to every Hollywood suit I’ve spent the last thirty years blaming for interfering with filmmakers.
Turns out some of you guys were doing important work.
Maybe the notes weren’t the problem.
Maybe the notes were the fucking movie.
Because Ice Cream Man isn’t merely a bad horror comedy. It’s what happens when every intrusive creative thought is apparently allowed to survive long enough to make the shooting script.
It’s undisciplined.
It’s ugly.
It’s painfully unfunny.
It’s tonally schizophrenic.
It’s obsessed with gore to the point that gore itself somehow becomes boring.
And most damning of all, it feels like nobody involved had enough authority — or enough courage — to simply tell Eli Roth:
No.
This Movie Doesn’t Wink at the Audience. It Gives Us Pink Eye.
Roth desperately wants Ice Cream Man to be funny.
You know this because the movie keeps informing you that jokes are happening.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Every exchange has that obnoxious comedic rhythm where you can practically see the screenplay nudging you with its elbow.
Eh?
EH?
GET IT?!
Yes.
We fucking get it.
That’s the problem.
The dialogue doesn’t wink at the camera so much as give it pink eye.
Characters don’t converse like human beings. They behave like unwilling participants in an improv exercise that should have ended fifteen minutes ago.
Setup.
Punchline.
Pause.
Setup.
Punchline.
Pause.
Nobody laughs.
Repeat.
There are jokes here that don’t merely fail to land. They crash through the floor, rupture a gas main and kill everyone inside the building.
And then the movie tells another one.
The Dinner Scene May Still Be Happening
Nothing exemplifies the movie’s complete inability to understand pacing better than the dinner-table sequence.
Holy fucking shit.
People sit down.
People talk.
People keep talking.
Other people respond.
More talking happens.
And eventually you begin wondering whether you’ve accidentally selected the extended edition of Thanksgiving.
The scene consumes so much running time that it feels like we skipped two meals while trying to get through it.
I started the scene hungry.
By the end I was considering intermittent fasting.
This is the kind of sequence where you become acutely aware of every second of your own mortality.
You start thinking about errands you could be running.
People you should call.
Maybe your gutters need cleaning.
Did you ever finish setting up that retirement account?
Because apparently nobody involved in editing Ice Cream Man was willing to say, “Perhaps we don’t need seventeen fucking minutes of this.”
And that becomes the defining philosophy of the entire movie:
Why use one minute when eight will do?
Why make one joke when six worse ones can suffocate it?
Why show something once when you can repeat it until the audience develops a neurological condition?
Which brings us to…
THAT STUPID FUCKING ICE CREAM MOUTH
We need to talk about the goddamn ice cream mouth makeup.
You know the one.
The smeared ice cream.
The sprinkles.
The exaggerated mess around the mouth.
The visual equivalent of the movie standing directly in front of you and screaming:
ICE CREAM!
Yes.
Thank you.
We understand.
Ice cream has sprinkles.
This just in:
Water = wet.
The movie is so enamored with this stupid fucking visual that it keeps dragging it back out as though we’re going to suddenly appreciate it on the nineteenth appearance.
We don’t.
The first time, fine.
It’s a visual.
The second time, okay, maybe it’s a motif.
The fifth time, you’re testing our patience.
By the tenth time, I’m starting to wonder if Roth believes sprinkles were invented specifically for this movie.
It’s not disturbing.
It’s not clever.
It’s not iconic.
It’s somebody smearing dessert around an actor’s mouth and apparently believing they’ve just created the fucking Joker.
We got it, Eli.
Ice cream.
There are sprinkles.
Please move on.
About These Kids…
Making children the center of a horror film is nothing new.
Some of the greatest genre films ever made have depended upon young performers.
But those movies generally possess one rather important ingredient:
child actors capable of carrying a movie.
Ice Cream Man does not.
And that’s not really the kids’ fault.
They’re being asked to carry comedy, horror, exposition, emotional beats and enormous stretches of dialogue in a movie that already can’t decide what the fuck it is.
Some of the performances are stiff.
Others are irritating.
Others have that unmistakable quality where you become painfully conscious that somewhere just outside the frame an adult is probably mouthing the next line.
Yet Roth repeatedly hangs entire scenes on them.
Eventually the question isn’t “Why aren’t these performances working?”
It’s:
Why did the director keep putting them in situations where they couldn’t possibly work?
A filmmaker’s job isn’t simply capturing performances.
It’s recognizing limitations.
It’s shaping material around actors.
It’s knowing when you’ve got the shot.
And occasionally it’s realizing:
You absolutely do not have the fucking shot.
And Then There’s the Sister
This deserves its own conversation because the movie certainly seems determined to keep having one.
The persistent hypersexualization of the sister character is fucking weird.
Not transgressive.
Not edgy.
Not provocatively funny.
Weird.
And creepy.
The movie returns to it often enough that eventually you stop wondering what Roth is trying to accomplish and start wondering why nobody else on the production asked him.
Once could be an awkward joke.
Twice could be a questionable creative decision.
Eventually it becomes a pattern.
And Ice Cream Man keeps returning to the well until the whole thing starts feeling less like boundary-pushing humor and more like something you wish you hadn’t noticed.
There are moments when this movie doesn’t feel like entertainment.
It feels like evidence.
The Effects Apparently Came From Several Different Movies
Some of the FX work is actually decent.
Which almost makes the bad stuff more baffling.
Because the quality fluctuates wildly.
One effect looks polished.
The next looks deliberately goofy.
Another looks genuinely grotesque.
Another looks like somebody yelled “FUCK IT, WE’RE LOSING THE LOCATION” and turned the camera on.
The result is complete tonal confusion.
Are we supposed to laugh?
Cringe?
Be frightened?
Be disgusted?
Admire the craftsmanship?
Mock it?
At various points the answer appears to be:
Sure.
The movie throws everything at you with absolutely no concern for whether any two consecutive scenes appear to belong in the same fucking film.
Yes, Eli. We Know You Like Gore.
I like gore.
You probably like gore.
Most people willingly watching an Eli Roth movie probably have a reasonably healthy appreciation for cinematic viscera.
But gore functions through escalation.
Timing.
Context.
Surprise.
Ice Cream Man approaches gore like a toddler discovering a light switch.
Blood.
Blood.
More blood.
Look!
BLOOD!
Did you see the blood?
Here’s more fucking blood!
Eventually the movie accomplishes something I didn’t think possible:
It makes gore tedious.
By the end of the first act, you’ve already seen so much of it that another geyser of blood carries roughly the same dramatic weight as somebody refilling a ketchup bottle.
That’s malpractice in a splatter movie.
It’s like running a strip club and somehow making people tired of nudity.
You had one fucking job.
Meanwhile, Somewhere, There’s Supposedly a Plot
Storylines enter Ice Cream Man and vanish like fathers going out for cigarettes.
Ideas appear important until they aren’t.
Questions get raised without answers.
Characters suggest larger threads that disappear.
Potential setups are introduced and seemingly forgotten.
The movie leaves plot strings dangling like the leather fringe on an aging biker’s jacket, whipping around uselessly behind it while Roth speeds toward another gore gag.
Eventually you realize the movie isn’t deliberately withholding answers.
It just forgot what it fucking asked.
Did Nobody Bring a Light Meter?
Then there’s the cinematography.
More specifically:
What the fuck happened to the lighting?
Lighting conditions change so wildly that scenes sometimes look like they were shot on different days, during different seasons, possibly by different civilizations.
Horror depends on lighting.
Atmosphere depends on lighting.
Continuity depends on lighting.
Visual storytelling depends on lighting.
Ice Cream Man occasionally seems to depend on whatever the sun happened to be doing that afternoon.
Watching some of these scenes, I kept imagining James Cameron walking onto Aliens, looking around and saying:
“Fuck it. We can probably just shoot this at high noon. It’ll be fine.”
Sure.
Why bother with all that blue light?
Why create shadows?
Why establish atmosphere?
Just put the xenomorph beside the fucking swimming pool at 1:30 in the afternoon.
Maybe give it a margarita.
At least then the complete absence of atmosphere would be intentional.
And This Is Where Things Get Interesting
Because Ice Cream Man isn’t simply another bad Eli Roth movie.
Bad movies happen.
Talented filmmakers make them.
Great filmmakers make them.
Sometimes genuinely brilliant directors shit the bed so spectacularly that you briefly wonder if someone else had been secretly directing their previous films.
But Ice Cream Man carries additional baggage.
This is the first film made under Roth’s own studio.
And that transforms this from a shitty movie into a rather fascinating piece of evidence.
Because now we have to ask a question nobody particularly wanted answered:
What does an Eli Roth movie look like when Eli Roth gets even more control?
Apparently…
This.
And suddenly you start reevaluating the past.
Maybe studio interference wasn’t preventing Eli Roth from making the movies he wanted to make.
Maybe studio interference was preventing him from making this.
Maybe those executives weren’t ruining his movies.
Maybe they were saving them.
Maybe somewhere behind Cabin Fever, Hostel and Roth’s better work were exhausted producers standing around with rolled-up newspapers, periodically smacking ideas off the table.
“No, Eli.”
“Too much, Eli.”
“That isn’t funny, Eli.”
“We already made that joke, Eli.”
“Yes, we know ice cream has fucking sprinkles, Eli.”
“No, we don’t need another close-up of the mouth.”
“Why are we sexualizing her again?”
“Where did that subplot go?”
“Why is this dinner scene still happening?”
“Eli, the fucking sun moved.”
Maybe those people weren’t interfering with a visionary.
Maybe they were editing one in real time.
And Ice Cream Man makes the absence of those guardrails painfully obvious.
Because creative freedom is valuable when an artist possesses the discipline necessary to use it.
Without discipline, creative freedom isn’t liberation.
It’s just nobody saying no.
Quit Throwing Money at Eli Roth
That’s what makes Ice Cream Man so much worse than simply being terrible.
There is money on the screen.
There are effects.
There are locations.
There are actors.
There is an established filmmaker with decades of experience.
There are resources thousands of independent filmmakers would sell organs to have access to.
And somehow all of that has been assembled into a movie that feels like it desperately needed one additional crew member:
An adult.
Somebody with authority.
Someone willing to look at Eli Roth and say:
“That joke fucking sucks.”
“Cut the scene.”
“Enough gore.”
“Fix the lighting.”
“Stop doing the sprinkle thing.”
“And for the love of Christ, we’ve been sitting at this fucking dinner table since breakfast.”
Because if Ice Cream Man really represents the opening statement of Eli Roth operating under his own studio infrastructure, then it raises serious questions about Roth’s adeptness when nobody above him is willing — or able — to intervene.
Maybe Eli Roth doesn’t need more money.
Maybe he doesn’t need greater creative freedom.
Maybe he doesn’t need people telling him how brilliant his next insane idea is.
Maybe he needs the thing Ice Cream Man appears to have been catastrophically deprived of:
Supervision.
Necessary supervision.
Aggressive supervision.
Possibly court-appointed supervision.
Because after watching Ice Cream Man, the most frightening possibility isn’t that Eli Roth has lost his touch.
It’s that we’ve finally gotten a good look at what his touch looks like when nobody is there to slap his fucking hand away.
0/5 Stars
