Vague Visages’ Ice Cream Man review contains minor spoilers. Eli Roth’s 2026 movie features himself, Ari Millen and Darrin Baker. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Eli Roth’s exercises in bad taste are always more tiresome than they are provocative, and his latest effort Ice Cream Man is no different, as it feels like the kind of gross-out splatter fest that the pre-teen protagonists would have made if they had access to cameras and practical effects equipment. Set in a quaint suburban town, the movie charts the rampage that ensues after the local kids are treated to a cursed dessert delivered by an eerily silent ice cream man (Ari Millen). When the van’s chimes play later that night, the protagonists wake up and start murdering their parents, teachers and any other adult authority figure, while the few immune kids are led by the lactose intolerant Jared (Charlie Zeltser), and Mia (Kiori Walden), who was spared from infection because the ice cream made her throw up.

Ice Cream Man’s slim plot exists to justify various over-the-top scenes of kids gleefully killing adults with increasingly elaborate methods of dismemberment. You can tell it was a blast for them to film, which is also the biggest criticism. As the British critic Mark Kermode once theorized, if cast members look like they’re having too good a time filming something, the results are usually self-indulgent and near impossible for an audience to sit through. Ice Cream Man builds to an appreciably mean-spirited third act which introduces supernatural lore out of left field, culminating with an oppressively downbeat finale — this all feels too little, too late after an hour of sustained wackiness, where no idea appeared to have been left on the cutting room floor. It’s a shame because there’s much to defend within that last stretch, but after so much childish comedy, the sudden pivot to a more sincere brand of supernatural horror feels incoherent. Roth all but asks viewers not to take anything seriously from the silly opening, and it’s a hard sell when he suddenly decides his story, written in collaboration with Noah Belson, should go dark during the final act.

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Since Ice Cream Man’s trailer premiered, many people online have speculated that the movie is Roth’s own rip-off of Weapons (2025), taking the bloody finale and stretching it out with a premise just different enough not to look like plagiarism. Surprisingly, Roth’s film has been over 20 years in the making, with an early draft dating back to the early 2000s as a potential follow-up to his 2002 directorial debut, Cabin Fever. If anything, this is the most damning thing about the project, as it shows absolutely zero growth in Roth’s capabilities as a comedic writer or director. He’s still driven by shock tactics over building tension, refusing to craft an effective scare because he knows he can get the same reaction from an audience by lazily pushing the buttons of bad taste. There’s no substance to the filmmaker’s provocation, no laugh that doesn’t feel cheap, even if he does land the punchline. Roth is Sam Raimi stripped of all charm and meaning.

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The emptiness is compounded by the lack of a wider allegory to ground the over-the-top carnage, although this is a recurring theme in Roth’s filmography. He might be the only director who could have made movies about Americans being tortured overseas in the 2000s with his Hostel series and overlooked the timeliness of this as a potential commentary on the War on Terror. Roth’s 2023 effort Thanksgiving might be his best film for grounding itself in the very real consumerist insanity of Black Friday. In Ice Cream Man, the villain’s curse spreads itself not just through the van’s chimes echoing through a neighborhood, but also by videos sent to the kids’ phones, which show quaint animations that they believe they’re acting out in their movements, not realizing they’re actually slicing up bodies and more.

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Based on Roth’s own outspoken political views, Ice Cream Man initially invites a conservative reading of a young generation getting their minds warped by their phones, acting upon what he likely believes are the destructive ideologies being shared there. As much as I wouldn’t ever find myself aligning with Roth’s views in that regard, I’d at least appreciate him having the courage of his convictions to explicitly outline them instead of just gesturing in that direction. It would be better than his usual and simplistic anti-PC messaging that feels like he’s trying to get a rise out of his audience rather than saying anything of substance, like the derisive depiction of young activists in his Cannibal Holocaust homage, The Green Inferno (2013). Unsurprisingly, there is no depth, only the allusion of a more substantive commentary. Roth is a director who thrives on his own thematic emptiness.

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Ice Cream Man is, quite simply, everything you’d expect from an Eli Roth movie, and suggests he may have gradually become a critic-proof filmmaker. He’s never dared to offer more than cheap thrills, and it’s becoming increasingly redundant to write at length about the sheer emptiness of his shock tactics.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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