Our own Paul Gratton takes a look at Eli Roth’s latest opus Ice Cream Man. The key synopsis here is “An idyllic summer town descends into madness when an ice cream man serves kids sweet delights with horrifying results.”
And for whatever reason, I’m getting flashbacks to Eddie Murphy’s bit about that the ice cream man is coming. Throw down some money!
Okay, I’ll move along.
Reaction: Eli Roth is responsible for some of the sickest scenes of extreme violence in the history of movies. Hostel (2005) and Hostel 11 were huge hits, and helped establish, along with the Saw series, a new torture porn subgenre within the slasher category of so-called horror films. The Hostel films would posit three nubile back-packers roving some unnamed Slavic country, who would be kidnapped and sold for the purpose of being snuffed for the amusement of rich sickoes. In one truly twisted scene from Hostel 11, in a scene you can never unsee once exposed to it, a disturbed woman masturbates in the dripping blood falling from a writhing screaming victim who is being ritually sliced by a scythe chained to the ceiling above her. Torture porn indeed. Roth has also had a somewhat successful career as an actor, notably in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Death Proof. As an actor, he is not bad, but as a director, all he has going is a willingness to break taboos.
In Ice Cream Man, he tries to push buttons again, but fails miserably. A happy little American small town named Bayleen Bay is turned into a murderous slaughterhouse when the children of the town are turned into homicidal psychos after tasting an ice cream truck’s purposely tainted frozen treats. Decapitations, dismemberment, you name it, these angelic little kids take great delight in aiming their dairy-induced wrath against parents and teachers. That malevolent children have already been well represented on screen in such series as Children of the Corn or Children of the Damned does not seem to have entered Roth’s mind. This is gore for gore’s sake, lacking wit or a satirical point of view. In the US, the film is only playing event spot bookings, and going out unrated. Here in Canada, it is getting a full quickie release, which is more than it deserves. This is the work of a hack.
Rating: 3 out of 10
