Hey guys!
2026 has been a great year for horror movies. We started the year with 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, moved on to creature features like Primate, folk horror like Hokum, and independent gems like Obsession and Backrooms. Of course, we couldn't have the good without the bad. And oh boy, do we have a strong contender for the worst horror film, nay, the worst film of the year.
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| Ice Cream Man (2026), dir. Eli Roth, produced by The Horror Section, MCT Studios |
Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man is a soulless, boring, drab, and annoying slog. And that's not even mentioning the AI elephant at the centre of this film. It follows the idyllic town of Bayleen Bay when a mysterious and creepy ice cream man comes to town and turns the children of the town into homicidal maniacs, who kill the adults of the town. Most of the film's less than 90-minute runtime consists of the absurd ways in which these killings are carried out. The children have fun as they gleefully burn, crush, decapitate, maim, poke, skin, and stab the adults of the town. The only positive thing about this film is that it is mercifully quick. Even then, somehow, the opening sequence before the killing begins feels like it drags on too long. The film is not a remake of the 1995 movie of the same name.
Eli Roth's horror relies on a very particular brand of cruelty and absurd gore. Movies like Hostel and The Green Inferno employ an oppressively nihilistic tone when torturing their poor victims, which makes those films somewhat bearable because of sheer tonal consistency. With Ice Cream Man, Roth opts for a more playful, upbeat tone. Instead of the dark red of those films, the blood is brighter. Instead of the cramped hostel or labyrinthian forest, the setting is the bright and sunny open world of the town. It makes for more creative kills, but it also robs the world of any bleakness it could've had. Such juxtaposition of gore with a happy town can be done, but Roth is not nearly as talented (or funny) to make it work. The gore gets boring twenty minutes in, and the rest of it is just a chore to get through.
Roth tries his hand at the tongue-in-cheek, campy horror vibe of 80s schlocky horror movies. The problem is simple: he lacks the charm that made those films a fun viewing experience. A scene at the center of the film, which has five of its goriest kills, is so comically poorly set up, staged, and written that it reads like an AI imitation of what this scene would look like in the 80s. Then of course, there are actual AI-generated images within the film. They look ugly and gross. The lifeless humanoids mimic human movement and try to emote, but they fail miserably. They are used to give the Ice Cream Man a half-baked backstory, which grinds the already bare-bones narrative to a halt.
There are no standout performances in the film. The writing is poor and tropey. The scenes establishing the family dynamic feel weirdly perverse, with a young pre-teen brother suggesting his older sister should start an OnlyFans to take advantage of her good looks, and the dad (played by Roth), wanting to visit a water park with a bunch of his daughter's high school friends. A slur is thrown in for no apparent reason. The visuals are ugly.
I cannot think of another filmmaker in the history of cinema who has gotten so many chances despite having never made a SINGLE good film. That is the only way in which Eli Roth is remarkable. I do not recommend this film at all.
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