Kids are the worst, or at least that’s what Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man posits, with little nuance or storytelling to find between its gruesome kills. Roth’s previous film, the slasher send-up Thanksgiving, worked in part because of its creative set pieces, but this film seems to exist purely so that Roth can see what level of shock and shlock he can get away with. But, at only 86 minutes, Roth leaves no space for developing characters or any tangible world worth saving.

If one wanted to be generous, Ice Cream Man could be seen as a new spin on the zombie horror genre. The best of those films concerns what happens to the last shreds of our humanity once society crumbles, like Night of the Living Dead and its treatise on racism, or 28 Days Later and its stance on masculinity. But Roth, along with co-screenwriter Noah Belson, is completely uninterested in making any grand statement, especially once the blood starts flowing. Thankfully Roth retains his pitch-black humor that propelled Thanksgiving, but it’s not enough to bring this pastiche back to life.

We barely get to know our heroes, brother and sister Jared and Lizzie (Charlie Zeltzer and Sarah Abbott, respectively), before carnage ensues. Not that we learn anything enlightening or unique about them afterwards, besides his heavily underlined and emphasized lactose intolerance. This comes in the face of the rest of his baseball team, and seemingly everyone else in their tiny town, eagerly lapping up the mysterious ice cream man (played by Ari Millen) and his wares. Any dope who’s seen a movie before will understand what’s going on once the aforementioned kids wake in the middle of the night and dispose of any adults in sight, especially once they show up to school the next day, unable to speak, with colorful ice cream stains around their mouths. Yet Ice Cream Man takes its time before Jared, Lizzie, and friends Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly) and Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) put two and two together and figure out a plan.

This feels like Roth’s excuse to execute more unsuspecting adults in increasingly ludicrous style, which is a fine enough idea on paper, but it eats into Ice Cream Man‘s potential to be more. We only learn the lore of the ice cream man and his motivation late in the movie, and what we do learn still isn’t terribly interesting, nor will it help you to reevaluate the carnage you’ve been watching. Roth’s career is full of exploitation cinema homages, from Hostel to The Green Inferno and Knock Knock, but Ice Cream Man is dully repetitive, unless the idea of kids doing creepy things in movies is new to you.

Horror has undergone a kind of renaissance already throughout 2026, with hits like Obsession and Backrooms fueling box office numbers. Indeed, the genre is often the most reliable in driving profits for studios for their low-risk-high-reward potential. Ice Cream Man does nothing particularly special with the space besides filling the screen with blood and decapitation for 80+ minutes. Perhaps Eli Roth was inspired to make the film because of the gleeful chaos during the finale of Weapons last year and seeing a bunch of kids literally rip an old lady to shreds, but he forgot that what made that moment so special was everything which led up to it.

Ice Cream Man will be in theaters nationwide on August 7.

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