Maya
From Canada
There are films that are so bad they’re good. Then there are films that are simply bad. And then, right at the bottom of the barrel, there are films that aren’t merely bad but deeply offensive. *Ice Cream Man* is what Eli Roth has scraped from beneath that barrel. Remember *Hostel*? One of Roth’s earliest films, it caused such a furore that it helped popularise an entire subgenre: “torture porn”. Yet, for all its reputation, Roth actually demonstrated considerable restraint. Some of its most frightening moments occur precisely when the camera turns away from the violence. His subsequent films—including *Hostel: Part II*, *The Green Inferno* and *Knock Knock*—suggested a steady erosion of that restraint and a descent into gleeful gore, obnoxious provocation and increasingly cringeworthy camp. There is plenty of all three in *Ice Cream Man*, and that is not necessarily a problem. Gore and camp can be enormously entertaining when handled with wit, imagination or technical skill. Here, however, everything is executed so artlessly that the film quickly becomes numbing. The effects look fake, the dialogue is juvenile, and the characters are little more than bodies waiting to be dissected. The performances are uniformly amateurish, from adults and children alike. Even allowing for the leeway usually afforded to young actors, it is painfully apparent that Roth has no idea how to direct them. Nothing is shocking because nothing feels consequential. It is simply boring. The film never finds a workable pace or tone. It lurches constantly between idiotic adults walking willingly towards their deaths, extreme close-ups of mutilation and tedious scenes in which the child protagonists recite dialogue so insipid that it sounds as though they wrote it themselves—although that is probably an insult to child writers. One character, temporarily paralysed, spends what feels like two solid minutes flopping from room to room like a landed fish. Whatever comic potential the sequence initially possesses is exhausted long before the scene ends. All of that would be disappointing enough. What makes *Ice Cream Man* genuinely enraging, however, is its relentless parade of offensive ideas masquerading as transgressive humour. A young woman is forced to promise that she will reconcile with her ex-boyfriend before he agrees to rescue her—and then she actually does. Paedophilia becomes the premise for a ludicrous comedy-horror that never comes close to establishing a coherent tone. A protagonist casually uses the ableist R-slur before another character turns autism into the punchline of the very next joke. In one grotesquely misjudged sequence, a Black person is chained to the back of a truck and dragged along the ground, invoking the imagery of racist violence and lynching, seemingly in pursuit of one more cheap shock. But the pièce de résistance—the final insult, the cherry on top, if you’ll pardon the pun—is the moment when a child actor, in a film released in 2026, is made to utter the following appalling line: > “I’m a 12-year-old girl. Of course I know how to throw up.” At that moment, it took everything I had not to get up and walk straight out of the cinema. Even by the low standards Roth has increasingly set for himself, *Ice Cream Man* is a disgrace. It is a film that mistakes misogyny for edginess, ableism for humour, and racist imagery for entertainment. Beneath all the gore and desperate provocation, there is no intelligence, no daring and no discernible humanity—just an ugly, witless film congratulating itself for having the nerve to be offensive.
