‘Ice Cream Man’ Feels Like (And Sometimes Literally Is) AI-Generated Slop

A film so unoriginal that it borders on being plagiaristic, the biggest surprise that Ice Cream Man has in store is that ChatGPT isn’t a credited writer at the end of the film. It feels like Eli Roth, the SICK and TWISTED mind behind such “classics” as Knock Knock and Borderlands, asked the question “What if the final scene of Weapons was an entire movie?” without stopping to wonder if that was actually a good idea.

The film follows… well, an ice cream man (Ari Millen). But this time, he’s an EVIL ice cream man who, through his sinister product, begins to possess the children of a small town and cause them to commit horrible acts of violence against any adults in the vicinity. It’s up to the lactose intolerant Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) to get to the bottom of this, and hopefully save the town from annihilation.

I can’t say Eli Roth is a director that has ever felt like a singular voice, but Ice Cream Man feels like a shameless attempt to cash in on the smash-hit success of recent possession horror hits like Weapons, with a small dosage of zombie cinema thrown in for good measure. It makes the comparison all the more embarrassing, because Roth’s film is missing something the best horror films have – any semblance of a soul.

Even outside of its AI usage, Ice Cream Man feels fundamentally uninspired

Part of that lies in the film’s transparent usage of generative AI for some horrible, rubber-hose style videos that play as part of the strange possession ritual, and seemingly for other establishing and montage shots throughout the film. Despite how much bandwidth (and water) is spent trying to convince us that generative AI will become an indispensable part of filmmaking, Ice Cream Man is further proof it looks awful even in a film as creatively bankrupt as this.

But even aside from that, this film is a particularly excruciating watch. Roth’s background working primarily in the splatter genre feels haphazardly applied here as he torments the film’s characters in deeply uncreative ways. I’m not averse to a bit of a horror gorefest, but it has to be in service of either fun or thematic potency. Ice Cream Man has neither, making its sub-90 minute runtime somehow feel like a three-hour drag thanks to its deeply uninspired kills and utterly painful dialogue.

As a film entirely bereft of humour, entertainment factor or even soul, Ice Cream Man veers into evil movie territory. I profess, I at least hoped it would reach the “so-bad-it’s-good” heights of something like Knock Knock, but the utterly indefensible use of generative AI as a creative tool exposes Ice Cream Man as a whole: a cynical attempt to cash in on recent horror trends in the quickest, laziest way possible. Boo!

½ 

Ice Cream Man is in cinemas now.