Spoiled Milk
*Author’s note: to read the pdf version of this review, click here
I’ve noticed that in the age of social media, there is this emphasis placed upon expediency. Content creators rush to flood the internet with their takes, regardless of how “right” or “wrong” we feel that the takes are. So I’ve sat around patiently since Monday night watching the various creators crucify Eli Roth for his newest film Ice Cream Man (which is not a remake of the ‘95 movie, nor an adaptation of the comic bearing the same name). I can honestly tell you that all of the smoke Roth is getting is warranted: the movie is downright awful. What has really surprised me is this contingency of people seemingly hitching their wagons to this film, almost defending it out of spite. Granted, there are of course people who will enjoy Ice Cream Man – I don’t know who they are, and I doubt I would ever take their movie preferences seriously, but I digress. So let’s get into the review.
Ice Cream Man is an abortion of a film, and if it came out any other year, it would probably legit be the worst film of the year, but luckily for Roth he put it out the same year as Corporate Retreat, and it’s almost impossible to be a bigger POS than that movie!
Don’t come for me with the whole “well you just don’t like B-movies” angle, because it’s not true at all; I, in fact, love B-Movies–one of my favorite horror movies of all time is Night of the Creeps (“thrill me”) for God’s sake! But this isn’t that. B-movies should be fun, and funny; Ice Cream Man is neither!
For starters, Ice Cream Man is legit kind of boring. Never in a million years did I think I would say that about a movie about kids gone wild, but here we are! I think the single most egregious act committed by Roth and co. is that Ice Cream Man’s three best kills were given away in the red band trailer! Couple that with just downright brutal pacing (more brutal even than the kills themselves), and an unoriginal concept that at its worst feels at times like a mashup of (the worst parts of both) Weapons and Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and you have this movie!
I won’t lie and say that the kills aren’t fun – they are at first, but there aren’t enough of them, and the ones that it does have begin to feel monotonous. Imagine if your favorite slasher just did the same thing over and over, with really nonsensical gaps in between; that’s kind of what you get with Ice Cream Man. Past the kills, there is ZERO depth: the characters are uninteresting, the plot (as I mentioned) is stale, the pacing is ATROCIOUS (I cannot stress this enough), and honestly everything is really poorly written (that’s not even including the stupid ass line about “I’m a teenage girl, of course I know how to make myself throw up”). The movie has a few laughs, but they are honestly unintentional, and the ones that are intended don’t land at all. I’m not even going to get into the A.I. discussion here, although I have to admit that any artist using generative A.I. in a product they expect people to pay for is a bad look, and would lead me to question what other shortcuts they are willing to take.
I suppose that is a proper segway into a discussion which I feel needs to be had concerning Eli Roth himself. I can accept the argument that is being made that there are people who are just “put off” by him, his style of filmmaking, his politics, etc. I do my absolute best to try to approach any artistic endeavor I consume independently of how I feel about the artist, and I always try to walk away with some thing that I can take away from the art itself. I feel like the two original Hostel films really brought something to the table: at the time they were not just edgy, but they were practically genre defying (despite being for a genre that generally comes with negative connotations)! I still feel like they hold up pretty well too. That being said though, I don’t really feel like Roth ever leveled his game up past where he was as a filmmaker with those two films. I would argue the one time since Hostel Part II that he showed significant chops was the Inglourious Basterds film-within-the-film Stolz der Nation (Nation’s Pride). As far as his other films go. I like Cabin Fever (the original), and The Green Inferno was honestly better than I expected, but that’s about as much praise as I can give (I still have ‘t watched Thanksgiving, due to saving it for this upcoming Thanksgiving). The only takeaway I am left with following Ice Cream Man is maybe Roth should just stop making movies, because it isn’t his strong suit: he will never make anything better than Hostel and Hostel Part II, period.
What I really think Roth has excelled at though is being a producer, which almost feels like a moot point now given the supposed story behind the creation of Ice Cream Man: coming off of Borderlands–a movie Roth claimed had significant studio interference–Roth wanted to do a movie without a studio, period. That’s all fine and good, but when you have a track record like he does with producing, I feel like it’s fair to expect way more out of a movie than what we got. Ice Cream Man supposedly had a $5.5 MILLION budget, and besides a few practical effects on a few of the kills, there is no sign of that budget anywhere in this film!
At the end of the day, despite what some really weird “fans” (I guess you would call them?) of this movie are saying, I don’t feel like creators are just hating to hate; there is no corroborated effort to sink Ice Cream Man, and I don’t feel like we all just hate Eli Roth. The movie is just not good by any margins, and that is absolutely coming from someone who gets the B-Movie schlock. If you want to be contrarian, and go watch Ice Cream Man just because you feel like “people are hating just to hate” or like all content creators are just trying to pull a “gotcha” on you, such is your right, but the movie is terrible, not because me or a bunch of people on the internet are saying it’s terrible, but because it’s just a lazy, awfully paced movie.