Fuck The Odyssey. For me the ultimate summer movie this year is Eli Roth’s gleefully gruesome horror comedy Ice Cream Man.
Set in the tranquil, suburban haven of Bayleen Bay, a mysterious ice cream truck rolls up at a kiddie baseball game one bucolic summer day. Young Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) is lactose intolerant anyway, but is creeped out by the sinister, ever-smiling ice cream man (Ari Millen) handing out frozen treats to all the children. He’s even more unnerved when he sees the truck parked near his house later that night. His teenage sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) is planning to cut school the next day but her jokey, pleasant parents (Eli Roth & Karen Cliche) inform her that is not going to happen.
The next morning, however, children are waking up and robotically attacking and killing their parents all over town- with baseball bats, hacksaws, electric saws, hammers and other weapons of mass destruction.
When Jarod arrives at school the next day he is confronted with an army of zombified classmates, their mouths and chins stained with ice cream and sprinkles, who suddenly and simultaneously rise up and begin to slay their teachers, in all sorts of ghastly ways. Jarod quickly aligns with two other unaffected kids- Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Waldman) and they run for their lives, trying to outmaneuver the hordes of homicidal tykes.
Eli Roth, with his encyclopedic knowledge of fright flicks, has thrown in this horror blender such killer kid movies as The Devil Times Five, The Children (1980 & 2008), Beware…Children at Play, Who Can Kill a Child?, Bloody Birthday and others, and sprinkled into it a generous portion of his own sardonic sense of humor. (Just wait for the fabulous send-up of The Birds). The movie has a great look to it (thanks to cinematographer Simon Shohet); hilariously hideous special effects and the soundtrack by Snoop Dogg and composer Brandon Roberts is just sensational. He even throws in fragments of Ennio Morricone’s haunting theme from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage for good measure.
What’s so satisfying and frightfully fun is that when it starts up (and that is pretty quickly) it never lets up. I was screaming with fiendish delight for almost the entire hour and a half. Whatever you do, make sure you sit through the credits for one final, blissfully gruesome, bit.
