Ice Cream Man’s Reign of Future Terror

The satirical impulse of horror-film specialist Eli Roth causes his best movies to edge into political commentary. In his latest, Ice Cream Man, Roth parodies the Millennial shift toward ideological extremes that started with dangerous enticements — such as Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign that adopted the term “brat,” those who enjoy the wide-eyed anti-capitalist embrace of socialism.

Roth laughs at these developments and heightens their cringe quotient when the kids at a suburban school unleash their hostility after imbibing the soft-serve treats of an ice-cream vendor (Ari Millen) whose jangly bells summon them to his truck. Millen’s mustachioed smile looks perfectly creepy, beyond anything Stephen King could imagine; he’s a John Waters–type ally whose open subversion ultimately betrays his customers.

There’s a delayed Pavlovian effect. The ice-cream-sated kids wake up in the middle of the night and attack their parents (presumably traditional Democrats) in a torrent of bloody executions. After the all-American opening of a Little League baseball game where a brat bullies sensitive Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) — “Forget him, he’ll get what’s coming to him. Bullies always do.” — the idea of revenge is double-edged.

Youthful innocence and cultural customs can no longer be trusted. (“Language!” a shocked father reprimands his foul-mouthed child.) Luckily, Jared is lactose-intolerant, so he avoids the tainted ice cream’s poisonous effect. Only his older, pubescent sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and a couple of schoolmates can resist the sudden, eerie urge to revolt.

The massacre scenes are a rowdy debauch; Roth’s notion of a blood-thirsty revolution recalls last year’s Weapons but outdoes it with the ingenious logic that powered the vision of generational chaos in Brian Taylor’s great Mom and Dad. The difference is that Weapons exploited real-life fears of school massacres while Roth catches the political vengeance that was the insight of his Green Inferno, a satire of Jacobin righteousness. (Here, Roth includes jokey jabs at James Carville and Mitt Romney.)

The kiddie reign of terror in Ice Cream Man has a frightening giddiness. One boy power-sands his dad, then dreams of his mom’s severed head in a fishbowl with goldfish swimming around it. A girl approaches her parents, lying in bed together, and saws her mother’s throat. Roth does horror as comedy, which is particularly funny when you realize that it’s only a slight exaggeration of what DSA brats promise. He extends the brutality to school, where teachers who indoctrinated their pupils get slaughtered.

When the kids respond to the ice-cream truck’s sentinel awakening of their bizarre vengeance, it’s hard to distinguish brattiness from zombieness. (A teacher is decapitated, and the ice-cream man scoops out the brains. Girls play jump rope and Jacob’s ladder with faculty entrails.) When Roth pulls back for a climactic long shot of the school and neighborhood aflame, with rampaging kids in the melee, it looks like America in the summer of 2020.

Ice Cream Man’s scariest allegory shows the kids dreaming a cloud-balloon animation of their massacres in which the victims have cartoon X’s for eyes. It’s a political version of the mysterious attacks in Hitchcock’s The Birds (Roth dares a parody of Hitchcock’s memorable jungle-gym gag).

As in Roth’s Thanksgiving, Americana is turned on its head — like Adam Sandler’s Hubie Halloween but with fangs. Roth’s best joke begins with the backstory explaining how the Ice Cream Man was victimized by a combination of lawfare, xenophobia (“He spoke with an accent, so we figured he came from someplace war-torn”), and the satanic occult. A priest tells Jared and his pals how to destroy the Ice Cream Man; Roth mocks their inability to comprehend the complex instructions — it’s better than any of the radical sympathizing in One Battle After Another.

Roth implicates himself by playing Jared’s father, legatee of family corruption. Roth’s final fillip suggests that the murderous mob (his son’s generation) will eventually awaken and remember none of their terror — like true baby Bolsheviks.

Ice Cream Man works beyond splatter-movie excess because Roth twists Hollywood’s facile idea of confection. He essentially takes the old playtime jingle “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream” and uses it to warn us about the generation currently singing along to “The Internationale.”