Ice Cream Man: sweet treats turn sour in Eli Roth’s gory story of evil kids attacking adults

A sequence in Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man recreates the set-piece from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in which Tippi Hedren sits outside a school and smokes, with singing children on the soundtrack, not noticing birds gathering on a climbing frame behind her. The joke is that instead of birds, the frame is occupied by its supposedly natural inhabitants – children. Rather than imperilling children, Roth unleashes brat hordes who have become possessed with murderous yet mischievous rage against adults after sampling gruesome new flavours of ice cream (with sprinkles) served by a smiling, unspeaking, old-fashioned street vendor (Ari Millen) from his retro-look van.

It’s not quite as clever as it would like to be. Roth hasn’t the patience to match Hitch’s editing rhythm, so he always skips build-up to get to the splatter – which is much more elaborate, explicit and fakey-looking than the pecked-out bloody eye sockets seen in progressive flash close-ups in The Birds. Roth’s major inspiration is the EC horror comics of the 1950s (Tales From the Crypt, etc.) which were snatched from the hands of tykes very like the baseball-playing, bike-riding kids of Roth’s archetypal small town by spoilsport adults. One EC story which particularly incensed censors involved a baseball match played with ripped-out body parts, an image reprised over and over on the Ice Cream Man’s playground, where little girls skip rope with teachers’ entrails, brains are gouged with an ice cream scoop and fed to their possessor, and heads are pounded flat to smeared mulch as bright as triple strawberry with a cherry on top.

Even setting aside Weapons (2025), Ice Cream Man – not to be confused with the 1995 slasher movie starring Clint Howard – has many, many precedents in turning children into murderous menaces. Roth, who gives himself an amusing Dad joke cameo, runs through gimmicks tried out in Sean MacGregor’s Devil Times Five (1974), Narcisco Ibáñez Serrador’s ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (Would You Kill a Child?) (1976) and Tom Shankland’s The Children (2008). These are confrontational, disturbing films – violent children, like horror comics, have generally been a triggering issue for censors. However, Roth’s version is childish (some kids would love it if somehow, they could get to see it) and steeped in 1980s horror tropes. An ‘explanation’ which parodies A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) sets up a ludicrously complicated curse-averting get-out clause which is really a narrative trap homaging two more recent hot ticket shockers. In theory, it’s mind-shattering ultimate horror; in practice, it’s ice cream itself – insubstantial and delicious.

► Ice Cream Man is in UK cinemas from 7 August.