A bunch of kids eat the wrong sort of dessert, which causes them to murder their parents in the most splatter-filled ways. And while Ice Cream Man may feature a bevy of preteens, taking your own kids to this just might qualify as child abuse.
Everyone knows that too much ice cream can be bad for you. But the sugary confections doled out by the newly arrived Ice Cream Man in the town of Bayleen Bay are particularly off-putting.
If a child eats some ice cream, that child will turn into a gleeful, homicidal psychopath. If a teen eats some, that teen could suffer a bout of paralysis. And if an adult should snack on a bit of dessert from the Ice Cream Man?
Well, who knows what might happen: Before that adult can take even one little slurp, she’ll be surrounded by murder-minded kids holding sharp garden tools.
Thank goodness that young Jared Mayfair is lactose intolerant. Jared may be a subpar Little League baseball player, but by the time the Ice Cream Man finishes doling out his wares, Jared may be Bayleen Bay’s only hope.
[Warning: The following sections contain spoilers. And gore. Lots and lots of gore.]
Ice Cream Man reminds us that food intolerances can have their upsides. Also, it takes the movie nearly 18 minutes before spooning out its first act of unspeakable butchery.
If the Ice Cream Man is looking to diversify, he’d be a natural to sell devil’s food cake.
A character specifically says that demonic forces are at work in Bayleen Bay. (Though given that the character is about 10, he’s likely not speaking from deep-rooted theological knowledge.) We see a little girl drawing a picture of her town burning as a devil dances in the midst of the chaos.
The spoiler-y details of why, allegedly, the Ice Cream Man cometh are unpacked, appropriately, in a church basement. Convicted of a series of crimes he didn’t commit, the Ice Cream Man is said to have made a deal with a necromancer who magically materialized in the Ice Cream Man’s jail cell—a necromancer bearing bloody scars in the shape of a telltale upside-down pentagram. The necromancer offered to give the Ice Cream Man his revenge on the town in exchange for his soul. The necromancer then supposedly changed places with the Ice Cream Man in the grave, while the Ice Cream Man—who promptly died in his prison cell—waited, postmortem, for a chance to exact his revenge.
It’s all rather convoluted, and we’re given reason to doubt several elements of the story. But clearly, something dark and supernatural is at work in this movie.
But whatever diabolical affliction is at work in the kids, it doesn’t prevent them from entering a church and killing at whim. Likewise, the Ice Cream Man himself seems unbothered by the holy place.
We see a cemetery filled with tombstones, some of which are in the shape of a cross. Someone intones that there’s a “special place in hell” for people who bear false witness.
Jared’s teen sister, Lizzie, wears some low-cut tops and tells her parents that she doesn’t want to become a lawyer (as they’d like); she’d like to “monetize my hotness while I’m young.” (Jared suggests jokingly that she should start an OnlyFans site.) Lizzie also has a history with a character named Chris. Their relationship clearly didn’t end well, but circumstances cause Lizzy to reconsider Chris’s merits—and the two wind up kissing.
Before the ice cream disaster hits Bayleen Bay, Lizzie campaigns to participate in her high school’s “skip day,” which involves a visit to a nearby water park. Lizzie’s mom tells her she’s out of luck: Lizzie will need to watch Jared. Lizzie threatens that, if Jared doesn’t find a friend to stay with, she’ll take him with her. “Please don’t take me to the water park!” Jared sarcastically says. “Girls in bikinis! It’s no place for a mischievous preteen!”
We hear some sexually charged jokes regarding other kids’ mothers, and a number of boys seem to have mild crushes on Lizzie.
Take a deep breath. Don’t get brain freeze. Here we go.
Ice Cream Man waltzes into theaters unrated, and the unremitting gore we’re exposed to is why. Actual butchers deal with less meat. Vampire conventions would look at the red-spattered streets with envy. Intestines have never seen so many alternate uses.
It’s worth noting that almost all the movie’s many, many fatalities are perpetrated by jubilant kids against their parents, teachers and other authority figures.
Also worth noting: Many acts of carnage feel positively repetitive.
Director Eli Roth, for instance, must feel that crushing heads is worth seeing again and again. Several are bashed and turned into bloody bits of mush. Decapitations are quite common, and the movie opens with a little girl sawing off her mother’s head with a hacksaw. (She carries the head around for much of the rest of the movie, sometimes gently combing its hair.) We see limbs chopped off, a woman hacked in half by a fire axe (with the body then gleefully pulled apart) and people pummeled with bricks, bats, frying pans and other implements.
While it’d be impossible to detail every bit of sticky death we see, let’s mention a few notable examples.
One man has the top of his skull sawn off, and a girl scoops out part of his brain and feeds it to the still-living victim. Another guy is hitched to the back of a truck and pulled through the streets, the body thwacking against a fire hydrant. (This is especially uncomfortable; dragging someone behind a vehicle to kill them has a very real, racially charged history and was, in fact, a main catalyst for federal hate-crime legislation. Notably, the victim is one of the few Black characters we see.) A woman kills herself with a gun after believing that she killed her own son (in self-defense). After the woman dies, the child stands up and walks away.
A man has several fingers severed and mangled by a garbage disposal, after which his children pour gas on him and set him on fire. Another man—a dentist—has his own running work implements jammed in his ear and skull, ultimately killing him. A fireman tries to rescue kids by scaling a tall ladder—which, of course, the kids then push over. Children squirt glue on someone’s face, apparently trying to seal everything shut. Multiple people are stabbed with various sharp objects.
Someone suffocates from having popsicle sticks stuffed in his nose and mouth. A corpse is seen on a workbench as his presumed son goes to work with a power tool. A jogger is tripped, knocked silly and then has a plastic bag thrown over his head. Bodies and body parts lie everywhere. Decapitated heads are held aloft. Fishbowls, microscopes, hammers and garden sheers are used as weapons. A child falls (or jumps, or is pushed) from a rooftop, seemingly dying in the process. (A little touch of ice cream on the kid’s lips revives him straight away.)
Most of the victims are actively trying to help these kids who wind up killing them. But the story comes with a spoiler-y pivot.
A generation ago, we’re told, the town’s children were sexually abused by a well-respected priest. Rather than convict the priest, the town turned on an outsider: the Ice Cream Man. Many of the abused children apparently followed the adults’ lead, agreeing to accuse the Ice Cream Man of heinous acts (and protect the town’s religious leader). Those false accusations and convictions spurred the Ice Cream Man into this diabolical revenge scheme—meting vengeance on those children, now adults, who falsely accused him.
Someone jokes that a local businessman probably has “bodies in the basement.”
About 55 f-words and nearly 20 s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p—y” and “d–k.” God’s name is misused about a dozen times—about a quarter of which come with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused at least twice, once with an f-word interjected in the middle.
We see a couple of teens, one in flashback, smoking cigarettes. Jared’s mom and dad drink wine at dinner. Lizzie and a friend buy something that Jared would very much like to share. While it’s not clear if they’ve bought drugs, it’s a strong possibility.
A girl vomits a couple of times, and the movie insinuates that she has an eating disorder. (The movie also practically passes it off as a joke.) Another teen girl jams an electric toothbrush down her own throat in order to upchuck contaminated ice cream.
But the messiest bit of vomit (this movie loves vomit) involves a possessed little girl who hurls all over—and I mean all over—the windshield of a moving truck. The resulting mess is made up of incredibly sticky ice cream (of course), which glues the windshield wipers in place.
We hear some conversation about what happens to Jared’s digestive system when he eats dairy. The Ice Cream Man’s wares come with some disgusting names, such as “Locust Lick” and “Froggy Swamp.”
As mentioned, Lizzie tries to convince her parents to let her skip a day of school, telling them that it’s tradition. When they ask why it’s not an official day off, Lizzie says, “That’s the point. You’re supposed to break the rules.”
“The point of rules is actually to not break them,” her father says. “That’s why they’re rules.”
Several kids make fun of Jared, and Lizzie suggests that he’d make an “excellent kidnap victim.” We see acts of child-on-child bullying.
Director Eli Roth is a great illustration of … something. Either he’s an example of why parents should force their kids to watch horrific entertainment or why services like Plugged In are so important.
“I saw (the R-rated horror movie) Alien when I was 8 years old,” Roth told Metro in 2002 (as requoted by Digital Spy), “… and that’s the movie that made me want to be a director. It traumatized me. I actually threw up I was so nervous after I saw it, but that’s like the highest compliment you can give a horror film.”
Certainly, Roth has had some success as a horror director. Not critical success, necessarily, but he certainly makes more money than a Christian movie reviewer does. And if that’s the kind of success you want for your kids—and you’re willing to take the one-in-a-million shot that they’ll make it in the movie industry—well, we won’t stop you. (How can we? We’re on the other side of this screen.)
But just as the Ice Cream Man’s in-movie product is corrosive and, yes, traumatizing, I wonder the same about Roth’s movies. He might’ve thrown up after watching Alien as an 8-year-old boy. However, now, in Ice Cream Man, he’s hired dozens of preteens to participate in a movie that is so grotesque that he knew it wouldn’t come close to qualifying for even an R rating.
To allow a child to watch Ice Cream Man could, in my mind, qualify as child abuse. To allow them to act in it? That’s another level.
This isn’t just a gross horror movie, a film that tries to shock for shock’s sake (and doesn’t even do that very well). This is a mean one. It ladles out vats of blood and guts, but it peppers its grotesquerie with characters and gags that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Steven Spielberg movie. And then, like its possessed, weapons-toting killers, it brings down the hammer, crushing even the tiniest bit of entertainment we might’ve been able to garner from the thing.
We’ve seen plenty of horror movies in 2026, and some have been pretty effective. They make me pay attention when they have something to say. Ice Cream Man is like a toddler screaming for attention—noise that does nothing but drive you a little crazy. It’s not persuasive, it’s not frightening, it’s not effective in any way. You just want to send this movie to its room and force it to think about its life choices.
Ice Cream Man is all blood and no heart. And that makes for a bad movie indeed.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
