Some movies are so awful they become enjoyable; others simply fail. Then there’s a bottom tier of films that go beyond being bad and cross into deeply upsetting territory. *Ice Cream Man* appears to be what Eli Roth has pulled from that very bottom. Do you recall *Hostel*? One of Roth's earlier works, it generated such controversy that it helped popularize an entire genre: “torture porn.” Despite its notoriety, Roth actually showed a good deal of self-control back then. Some of the most frightening moments in that film happen precisely when the camera avoids showing the violence directly. His later films—including *Hostel: Part II*, *The Green Inferno* and *Knock Knock*—suggested a gradual lessening of that restraint, leading to an embrace of excessive gore, deliberately irritating provocation, and increasingly awkward humor. *Ice Cream Man* has all three of those qualities in abundance, which isn’t inherently problematic. Gore and camp can be quite entertaining when they're handled with cleverness, imagination or skill. However, here everything is done so clumsily that the film quickly becomes numbing. The special effects look fake, the dialogue is childish, and the characters are essentially just bodies waiting to be harmed. The acting is uniformly poor, from adults to children. Even giving young actors some leeway, it’s obvious Roth doesn't know how to direct them. Nothing feels shocking because nothing carries any weight. It’s simply dull. The film never establishes a consistent rhythm or tone. It shifts abruptly between foolish adults willingly walking into danger, extreme close-ups of dismemberment and long stretches where the young characters recite dialogue so bland it sounds like they wrote it themselves—which would probably be an insult to child writers. One character, temporarily paralyzed, spends what feels like a very long time flopping around a room like a fish out of water. Any potential humor in that sequence is exhausted long before it concludes. That alone would be disappointing enough. What makes *Ice Cream Man* truly infuriating is its constant display of offensive ideas disguised as transgressive comedy. A young woman is forced to promise she’ll reconcile with her ex-boyfriend before he agrees to save her—and then she actually goes through with it. Paedophilia becomes the basis for a ridiculous horror-comedy that never manages to establish a clear tone. A character casually uses an offensive slur, and another turns autism into the punchline of the very next joke. In one particularly poorly judged scene, a Black person is chained to the back of a truck and dragged along the ground, evoking images of racist violence and lynching, seemingly just for another cheap shock. But the worst part—the final insult, the icing on the cake, if you’ll allow the pun—is when a child actor in a film released in 2026 delivers this appalling line: > “I’m a 12-year-old girl. Of course I know how to throw up.” At that point, it took all my effort not to stand up and leave the cinema immediately. Even considering Roth's increasingly low standards for himself, *Ice Cream Man* is a failure. It’s a film that confuses misogyny with edginess, ableism with humor, and racist imagery with entertainment. Beneath the gore and desperate attempts at provocation, there’s no intelligence, no bravery, and no discernible sense of humanity—just an ugly, unfunny movie congratulating itself for being offensive.

Source on TMDB