Earlier this summer time, Eli Roth launched Ice Cream Man, a tedious, blood-soaked horror film tarnished by AI slop and cringey dialogue. It is too unhealthy, not simply because I anticipated higher from the director of Cabin Fever and Thanksgiving, however as a result of Roth additionally sullied the nice identify of one other schlocky horror film with the very same title that is a hell of much more enjoyable to look at.
Launched in 1995, Ice Cream Man is the kind of so-bad-it’s-good horror film that not often will get made within the post-Get Out period the place the style is taken far more significantly. Directed by pornographer Paul Norman, who hoped this was his pivot to kid-friendly horror flicks, Ice Cream Man is a film the place a deranged killer mixes up bugs, human stays, and ice cream and feeds it to youngsters. It is also a film that spends a outstanding period of time displaying us what sneakers everyone seems to be sporting, as per a sponsorship settlement with Converse that in all probability price some poor sneaker govt his job. Norman could have wished to flee X-rated movie, however he wound up making one of many creepiest tales ever placed on movie.
In different phrases, not like the Eli Roth film, the unique Ice Cream Man is a B-movie horror masterpiece, and in the event you’re in search of an absurd scary film to get into the Halloween spirit, you really cannot do higher than this.
Ice Cream Man stars Clint Howard (Ron Howard’s youthful brother) as Gregory Tudor, a severely troubled man who witnessed the homicide of one other ice cream truck driver when he was a toddler. Gregory winds up in a psychiatric establishment the place he receives remedy that verges on abuse. When he is lastly launched as an grownup, he does the one logical factor: purchase his personal ice cream truck and begin murdering individuals.
Howard later mentioned he was impressed by a real-life ice cream man from his childhood who used to scream at youngsters whereas driving his truck. Nevertheless, it is the actor’s unparalleled capability to keep up a particular kind of unhinged vitality for lengthy stretches of time that makes Gregory a very off-putting antagonist, even earlier than he begins chopping off heads.
In early scenes, Gregory largely simply drives round promoting ice cream to youngsters. The viewers quickly learns he is been mixing varied gross issues into his ice cream, together with his homicide victims. Native youngsters begin disappearing (we get some hilariously awkward scenes of Howard chasing down varied terrified youngsters) and those who’re left wrestle to persuade any grownup to care.
Finally, the cops understand one thing is amiss. A detective performed by Jan-Michael Vincent (sure, the man from that Rick and Morty episode) visits the psychiatric establishment the place the ice cream man grew up, which ends up in one of many movie’s most unnerving sequences of the police navigating a decrepit constructing filled with listless psychiatric sufferers and docs. It is an excruciatingly lengthy scene that bounces from scary to humorous to scary once more as Vincent pushes his approach by way of a seemingly infinite crowd of zombie-like moaning individuals with outstretched arms.
After that, the story ends with a closing showdown in Gregory’s blood-soaked ice cream manufacturing unit the place one in all his abductees, “Small Paul,” tips the killer into strolling into a large stand mixer the place he’s subsequently dismembered. One closing scene hints that the ice cream-related trauma that fueled Gregory’s rampage could have been handed on to Small Paul. Sadly, we by no means received a Small Paul sequel. (Extra on that in a minute.)
Whereas the plot of Ice Cream Man is nonsensical, the story of how this film got here into existence is even stranger.
It began with Paul Norman, who underneath the pseudonym “Norman Apstein” directed such movies as Intercourse with the Vampire, Edward Penishands, and The Erotic Adventures of the Three Musketeers. Norman determined to make a scary film for teenagers, so he employed some writers (together with Wedding ceremony Crashers director David Dobkin) to spit out a draft for what was initially extra of a horror spoof. Norman solid identified actors like Howard and Vincent to provide Ice Cream Man a veneer of legitimacy, however a $2 million finances (together with that Converse deal) saved it firmly in B-movie territory.
Some scenes had been truly filmed in Norman’s home, and he solid himself, his spouse, and his son in bit elements. The manufacturing additionally substituted mashed potatoes (with plenty of meals coloring) for ice cream in lots of scenes to maintain the frozen dessert from melting in between takes. One youngster actor has a literal pillow stuffed underneath his shirt your entire time as a result of the script says he is fats however Norman solid a thin child as a substitute. Vincent was additionally apparently drunk for a lot of the shoot. (Amazingly, that is all revealed within the DVD/Blu-ray commentary.)
Ice Cream Man debuted in Chicago on the 1995 Clint Howard Movie Competition, which so far as I can inform was a one-time-only occasion the place three movies that includes Howard had been screened. It did not make a lot of an affect on the time — three many years later, there nonetheless aren’t sufficient opinions on the market to even advantage a Rotten Tomatoes rating — however Ice Cream Man grew to become a cult basic because of the magic of bodily media and horror sickos in every single place.
There has additionally been some speak of a sequel in recent times. In 2014, Howard helped again a Kickstarter marketing campaign for a brand new film, which got down to increase $300,000 and fell extraordinarily wanting these objectives, gathering simply $4,000. The actor introduced in 2025 that work had begun on a sequel, by which he’d play a brand new ice cream man, and promised the movie would clarify among the authentic’s weirder plot components — like why Gregory was obsessive about mixing human physique elements into his ice cream.
Whether or not that sequel ever materializes stays to be seen, though after the harm Eli Roth did this 12 months to the Ice Cream Man model, we want the return of Howard’s oddball serial killer now greater than ever. However both approach, no one can take away the unbridled chaotic great thing about the unique movie.
Ice Cream Man is streaming without spending a dime on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Roku.