Ice Cream Man 2026 Movie Review
When we booked last night’s Secret Screaming, my brother and I hoped the film they played would be ‘Leviticus (2026)’ or maybe even ‘Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma (2026)’. As the night drew nearer, we did a bit more research and determined it was likely to be either ‘Insidious: Out Of The Further (2026)’ or ‘Ice Cream Man (2026)’. Out of those two options, we both preferred it would be the latter, solely because we enjoyed Eli Roth’s pulpy post-post-ironic slasher ‘Thanksgiving (2023)’ (and also because we haven’t seen any Insidious movies other than the first). We were right: it was ‘Ice Cream Man (2026)’. But we were also wrong: we would have been better off with ‘Insidious: Out Of The Further (2026)’.
After a fairly slow opening devoid of anything other than bad jokes, ropey performances and kids saying the F-word, the feature eventually becomes every bit as vicious and bloodthirsty as its ‘unrated’ label implies. It basically becomes an ever-escalating contest of depravity, challenging each new scene to be somehow more disgusting and gruesome than the last. What’s even more disturbing than its genuinely off-the-charts levels of violence and gore, though, is its flagrant and fairly frequent use of AI, not only in flashbacks and on screens but also in establishing shots and insert shots and sometimes even composited into live-action footage. Every time this happens, it’s like the film is slapping you across the face, its brutality reaching beyond the borders of its frame to assault – or, rather, insult – you personally. And of course these moments look like absolute ass, somehow fuzzy yet over-sharp all at once. There’s simply no excuse for this kind of thing, even though the film was independently financed mostly via fundraising. After all, its ultimate budget is $5.5 million, which is relatively low but still almost ten times the amount afforded to ‘Obsession (2026)’. If that movie, which sits on the absolute opposite end of the 2026 horror movie spectrum, can look as good as it does on a budget of just $750,000 (without the use of AI), then surely the issue isn’t money, but talent. Even if we take AI out of the equation, Eli Roth’s latest just looks bland and unexciting, despite its colourful presentation. It has no real sense of atmosphere or style, and the aesthetic choices it makes are often garish and ugly. Obviously, most of the money went into the thankfully mostly (or, at least, largely) practical special effects, but you need more than a string of sadistic kills and gory images to make something that feels worthwhile.
With its wonderfully absurd premise and apparent intention to call back to obscure video nasties discovered on the bottom shelves of rental stores in the 1980s, the flick had the potential to be pulpy fun that knows exactly how ridiculous it is and relishes it. In someone else’s hands, it may have been just that. In Eli Roth’s hands, it feels one-note and paper-thin and also just… wrong – seedy, even. It revels in violence so much that it comes close to fetishisation at times, with the whole point of the piece being to show as many cold-blooded murders as explicitly as possible (rather than use those murders to create any kind of tension, stakes or scares within an actual story worth telling). This is especially strange considering so much of the killing involves children (I hope the young actors aren’t traumatised by having to handle realistic severed heads and intestines and all sorts of other horrid little things), and there are also just a lot of so-called ‘edgy’ jokes about eating disorders and teenagers in bikinis that feel plain strange (others have pointed this icky feeling out, and I have to say I agree with them). With a concept like this, the flick should have been either a sickly sweet treat that you know isn’t good for you but you consume anyway because it goes down easy and gives you a sugar high, or an overload of uncanny high-energy excess that makes you do what ice cream does to those of us less tolerant to lactose: mess yourself. It ends up being neither of those things, failing to scare or amuse, and falls flat on its face because of it. Its uber-violence is meant to shock you into laughter as you view it from between your fingers, but it simply doesn’t work because every moment is turned up to eleven so ultimately none of them are. Within minutes, you know exactly what Roth is trying to achieve, so the flick slips into tedium. Without any kind of atmosphere, suspense, style or even story, the feature becomes nothing other than monotonous and numbing. Like too much ice cream, it just gives you brain freeze.
Perhaps the picture would have been funny as a two-minute fake trailer, but it simply can’t withstand even a runtime of just under ninety minutes. It’s repetitive, a short stretched so thin you can almost see through it, and the fact that it makes ‘Evil Dead Burn (2026)’ look certifiably PG by comparison isn’t enough to compensate for this (it also makes ‘Evil Dead Burn (2026)’ look like an unmitigated masterpiece, but that’s beside the point). The hyper-violence is mitigated by tone and utter absurdity, but that just makes it boring. It doesn’t become subversive fun by being so outrageously dark, it just becomes unmoving. Its attempts at comedy don’t even stem from actual jokes, just overwhelming excess and attempted shock value, which feels cheap and will almost certainly leave you feeling cold. During the Secret Screaming I attended, there were far more walkouts than I’m accustomed to. Unusually, though, it was almost impossible to tell if that was because of the gore or because of the quality.
The movie is out together competently enough and there are some unsettling gore gags that certainly push the upper bounds of what I’ve seen on the big screen (at least visually, if not tonally), but competency just isn’t enough. It’s often fine, but never more. As such, it ends up being much less. It’s the sort of thing that feels as though it should be a least a bit of fun, but is ultimately so monotonous that it never quite manages to be so. It has moments that work quite well, but these are honestly few and far between, and the flick’s flaws do far more damage than its successes can repair. After ‘Thanksgiving (2023)’ (which, again, I’ve genuinely enjoyed both times I’ve seen it), I felt as though Roth’s not-so-stellar reputation must have been somewhat hyperbolic. Now, I think ‘Thanksgiving (2023)’ was a fluke and he’s every bit the hack most people seem to say he is. Perhaps that’s unfair, but I don’t feel too bad about it after learning a bit about his, shall we say, personal beliefs. In the end, his latest leaves a very bad taste in the mouth. I like it even less now than I did last night.
