Producers: Eli Roth, Kate Harrison Karman, Christopher Woodrow and Raj B. Singh   Director: Eli Roth   Screenplay: Eli Roth and Noah Benson   Cast: Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Shiloh O’Reilly, Sarah Abbott, Dylan Hawco, Benjamin Byron Davis, Eli Roth, Karen Cliche, Darrin Baker, Lorenzo Antonucci, Luke Dietz, Eli Massillon and Charlie Storey   Distributor: The Horror Section

Grade: D

Eli Roth apparently thinks he’s doing something subversive with “Ice Cream Man,” a garish comic-horror movie about the grade-school kids in a small town moved to slaughter the adults after eating the ice cream doled out by the creepy title character (Ari Millen).  It offers a succession of gruesomely gory murder sequences, done up in chintzy practical special effects, that grow increasingly tedious despite their escalating grossness.    

As the movie opens, Bayleen Bay is enjoying a beautiful summer day, with a little league game part of the fun kids are having in the park.  Actually, the game’s fun for everybody but Jared (Charlie Zeitzer), an awkward kid whose poor play leads to his team’s loss—and his getting bullied.  He’s also lactose intolerant, so when the ice cream truck rolls past and the  other kids swarm it for the hideous-sounding flavors it hands out, he’s unable to join in. 

In that he’s lucky, since those who do become murderous urchins with smears of color on their faces, decapitating their parents or doing away with them in other unpleasant ways. (Roth seems to have a particular affinity for decapitation; it also played a prominent role in his far superior, if admittedly conventional, 2023 slasher movie “Thanksgiving.”)  Jared quickly joins with a couple of other uninfected classmates, plucky Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly), to fight back as the horde invades the school, at first confounding their dumb-as-rocks teachers and then happily massacring them.  Principal Maloney (Darrin Baker) gets an especially nasty send-off involving what might be called a brain-scooping.

The threesome isn’t without older helpers.  To be sure, Jared’s parents Marty (Roth) and Alison (Karen Cliche) are useless, or worse (Roth and co-writer Noah Benson err badly in providing them with an extended dinner-table scene that drags pointlessly), but his older sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) becomes part of their troupe.  She even brings along her doofus ex-boyfriend Chris (Dylan Hawco) and his pickup.

Yet they’re stymied as to how to proceed until they repair to the local church, where the priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) stops the movie dead in its tracks with an interminable account of the ice cream man’s backstory, which has a lot of “Nightmare on Elm Street” elements to it. That in turn leads to a finale in the cemetery, with a twist that forces Jared and Lizzie to deal with unwelcome revelations.

“Thanksgiving” proved that Roth could tease decent performances from a competent cast, but here, partly because he’s so often simply trying to corral crowds of children, he loses control even of his adult actors, among them himself.  The result is performances that are stilted and halting all around.

But, of course, that’s meant to be inconsequential, since the picture’s supposed to coast along on its cartoonishly outlandish violence, all the more outrageous since the mayhem is meted out by sweet-looking kiddies.  The sight of such darlings carrying around their parents’ heads (or playing tether ball with them), or jumping rope with human entrails, all shown in gloriously bright color images contrived by production designer Peter Mihaichuk, costumer Jenifur Jarvis and cinematographer Simon Shohet is intended to leave us giddy with delight, but it doesn’t. Instead, it pales with repetition, especially since Matt Lyon’s editing is choppy and becomes positively leaden in the later going.   The bubbly score by Brandon Roberts and (of all people) Snoop Dogg proves more annoying than engaging.

The idea of murderous children, pace Roth, is nothing new, of course.  One can go back to Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 “The Bad Seed,” which holds up pretty well despite its excessive theatricality and defanged ending.  (It also inspired Joseph Ruben’s far less successful “The Good Son” in 1993.)  But if you’re looking for an unapologetically bleak shocker about how malevolent kids can get, check out Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s “Who Can Kill a Child?” (1976).  By comparison to it, “Ice Cream Man” is just a ghoulish cartoon.