Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man: zombie kids slaughter adults in a school massacre

Director Eli Roth, known for the thriller Thanksgiving and the failed Borderlands adaptation, has released a new horror film, Ice Cream Man. It is an original project by the filmmaker, not a remake of the 1995 trash horror of the same name starring Clint Howard, nor an adaptation of the Image Comics series. The picture is pure splatter — a subgenre whose peak popularity came in the 1970s and 1980s, where blood and guts take up about 80% of screen time.

The action takes place in the cartoonishly idyllic American suburb of Baylin Bay. The summer idyll of children playing baseball is disrupted by the arrival of an ice cream truck driven by a mute, eerily smiling Ice Cream Man, played by Ari Millen. He gives out free treats to kids, but anyone who eats the ice cream turns into a bloodthirsty maniac whose sole goal is to kill any nearby adult in the most brutal way possible.

The protagonist is schoolboy Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), saved by his lactose intolerance: he did not eat the ice cream and survived. Along with his older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and other uninfected children, he tries to survive in a town that turns into a bloody slaughterhouse overnight. Nearly a third of the modest 86-minute runtime is taken up by a mass massacre at a school: zombie kids with dried ice cream stains on their faces use everything at hand — from microscopes into which teachers' eyes are brutally shoved to swings on the playground. Some kills are three-step comedic masterpieces, like the scene where a father steps on a mousetrap.

The film barely tries to be serious: it is a collection of grotesque, absurd deaths that sometimes resemble a bloody version of Home Alone or classic Looney Tunes cartoons. It feels like the movie arrived at least 20 years too late, or even 50, but that is exactly its charm — a disgusting, bloody, senseless picture that triggers both nausea and nervous laughter at once.