has put Eli Roth’s ice cream man horror movie in the year’s bottom tier, calling it one of the year’s worst horrors and describing it as a rushed retro horror made on the cheap. The review lands on the first direct contribution Roth has made to Horror Section, and it turns a title built for gore into a case study in how fast a slasher can look underfunded.
Charlie Zeltzer Plays Jared
Charlie Zeltzer plays twelve-year-old Jared, the lactose-intolerant kid who can eat the free ice cream without falling under Ari Millen’s spell. That single detail gives the movie its cleanest internal logic: Jared can move through the town-wide chaos while Tommy, Mia, and later his older sister Lizzie get pulled deeper into it.
Ari Millen’s ice-cream man gives out cursed treats that turn local kids into feral, zombie-like killers, which is the kind of setup that should buy a horror film some slack even before the blood starts flying. Instead, the review says the movie’s bad CG blood spatter and cut-rate aesthetics flatten the effect, and the film ends up looking cheap as hell rather than deliberately nasty.
Horror Section and the Budget
Eli Roth built Horror Section as a horror-focused company, and Ice Cream Man is his first direct contribution to it. That makes the movie more than a one-off genre exercise: it is the first test of how much mileage Roth can get from a retro slasher that leans on a knowingly disreputable premise instead of scale.
The title itself is a small trap for casual readers. Ice Cream Man shares its name with a 1995 direct-to-video curiosity starring Clint Howard, but the films are unrelated, so the new movie is not a remake, sequel, or continuation. That leaves Roth with the burden of making the material feel current, and the review’s complaint is that the movie reaches for inventive gore while the cheap look swallows the effort.
Roth, VHS, and the Missed Bite
Eli Roth has made his name with Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving, and the review places Ice Cream Man at the weak end of that run. By comparison with the more controlled, period-aware energy of Thanksgiving, this film reads less like a precise genre throwback and more like a shortcut past the work of making low-budget style feel intentional.
What the review leaves hanging is not the premise, but the balance between design and limitation. If Horror Section is going to be Roth’s vehicle for stripped-down horror, the next question is whether the rough texture is the point or the problem, because Ice Cream Man looks like a film that can sell the pitch before it can sell the frame.
