There may be no more twisted filmmaker working today than Eli Roth. I say that with admiration and with affection. Since introducing himself with CABIN FEVER in 2002, he has honed his skill at creating a perfect storm of horror, satire, and human drama. And so it is with ICE CREAM MAN, a subversive gloss on classic Americana that reveals a town without pity and what happens to it when the de riguer dark secret is revealed. Along with innards of all types. So many innards.
The bucolic town of Bayleen Bay, shortly to become the scene of carnage worthy of Caligula and CALIGULA, is moving towards the pleasures of summertime. For pre-teen Jared (doughty Charlie Zeltzer), it’s off to a bad start as he loses his baseball team their game just before summer vacation. So egregious was his error that the local bully (Ivano DiCaro) takes time away from terrorizing the other kids and their parents, by singling him out with special verbal trauma before literally taking ice cream from a baby. Well, a much smaller kid.
That treat arrives via a new ice cream truck with a jingle that is sprightly, but in a distinctly funerial fashion. The ice-cream cone mascot on the roof smiles, but not benignly, and its eyes follow Jared wherever he goes. Being a kid, however, it doesn’t deter him, and everyone else, from buying an actual cone from the proprietor (Ari Millen), dressed like a Norman Rockwell painting of a purveyor of ice cream. He’s immaculately groomed from his toothbrush mustache to the jaunty tilt of his paper hat, and his smile is wide but not quite right. Like that jingle his truck plays, or the odd flavor names, such as Locust Lick and Serpent Swirl on offer. Fortuntately for Jared, his teenage sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) knocks that cone to the ground before the lactose-intolerant Jared can make both their lives a living hell with what happens when the boy’s system fails to process dairy.
Of course, there’s more than fats and sugar being proffered, and we quickly move from a past-bedtime parental beheading to scintillating assortment of violent demises as the kids who had ice cream now rise up to wreak havoc with wild abandon and childlike wonder. Let’s just say that’s not a snow-angel one of them makes, nor a typical jump rope being used for double-dutch later on as the action moves to the next day and a suitably grisly reckoning.
Throughout there is a finely wrought absurdity to the proceedings as Jared’s parents (pun-tastic Mr. Roth himself and super mom Karen Cliche) shrug off something odd at the neighbors’ house across the street while on their way to work. As teachers fail to register that their students have changed. With their mouths smeared with the bright pastels of ice-cream flavors, sullen silence, and a failure to follow instructions, they make no more of an impression than passing notes would on teachers already checked out for the school year. And Mr. Roth pays homage to Hitchcock in a way that is sublime in its iconic horror.
He also maintains the golden sunshine of summer’s promise and a color palette right out of the Dick and Jane reader series as teachers are disassembled in a variety of innovative ways, sometimes prompted by videos that pop up on phones looking both retro and disquieting. And that’s before they start giving pointers on how to perform patricide and matricide. That luminescence coupled with adults behaving in their rote roles is slyly juxtaposed with bloodletting that always takes those adults by surprise, and with the handful of kids in town who didn’t eat ice cream running blindly while making up an escape plan on the fly. There is even time for teenage romance and its attendant drama as rejected boyfriend Chris (Dylan Hawco) uses the growing crisis to win back Lizzie before going to rescue her little brother. The dialogue is crisp and ironically wry even as corpse piles on corpse, visualized by arch direction as Mr. Roth relishes more than a few classic tropes while zinging new life into them.
At the center is the enigmatic title character, who never speaks a word, but does so much with that too-broad rictus of a smile and a dash of commedia dell’arte to bring the kind of quiet menace that populates nightmares and haunts waking hours. Couple that with a culture that worships the concept of child-rearing, but has a lingering fear of feral children running rampant and you have a diverting entertainment that refuses to try to be more profound than it actually is.
To be sure, ICE CREAM MAN is a one-note film with just enough narrative to stitch it all together, but Mr. Roth has taken that one note and put it through, ahem, baroque paces. Sharps and flats harmonize with grace notes exploring varieties of pitch and tempo, as it were, taking a cherished symbol of a carefree season and turning it inside out.
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