Horror fans have had plenty of frights to choose from this summer, from the surprise box office hits Obsession and Backrooms, which followed well-received titles like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Hokum and more. One upcoming horror movie, however, may be notable for the opposite reason: Reviews are out for Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man, and could this be one of the year’s worst scares?
The killer kid aspect of Ice Cream Man has drawn comparisons to Weapons, one of CinemaBlend’s favorite movies of 2025, but it doesn’t sound like there are too many similarities. The plot involves a mysterious ice cream man whose treats turn the idyllic suburban town’s children into murder machines. William Bibianni of The Wrap says in his Ice Cream Man review that the slasher runs out of shock value almost immediately:
The first time you see a little kid chopping their parents to bits with a demented grin on their face it’s shocking. The second time it’s merely gross. After the hundredth time, it’s obvious that Ice Cream Man has only one gag. By the millionth, it’s just boring. … Everyone likes a good gross-out horror comedy, and even the bad ones can be fun, but the repetitive ones are another story. Or in the case of Ice Cream Man, they barely have a story at all.
Jerrod Jones of AV Club rates the movie a C, calling it an “empty-calorie horror,” with the cherry on top being a twist near the end that turns Ice Cream Man into Eli Roth’s bleakest work to date. Jones says:
This creative zeal eventually sputters out. … After the initial burst of mayhem in the first act, the movie settles into a repetitive survival yarn that almost resembles a Gen-Alpha Goonies production of George Romero’s Dead films, with Millen’s mustachioed villain functioning as the sinister Pied Piper for his cherubic kill squad. But the ice cream man’s motives and the scheme that sics the children on the adults never develop beyond the hand-waving idea of generational revenge that the surrounding butchery is built on.
Pete Hammond of Deadline describes the upcoming 2026 movie release as Home Alone meets Hostel, which is terrifying in itself. Ice Cream Man, which Hammond points out is being released Unrated to avoid being slapped with an NC-17, is just another excuse for mind-numbing graphic terror, the critic writes, with too little plot to keep us interested. He continues:
It seems ill-timed since this year has also seen smart reinventions of the horror genre with the likes of Obsession and Backrooms finding critical acclaim and huge audiences. With this film though, we are just back to basics with no ambition beyond finding ways to tear the human body apart that somehow we haven’t seen before. There is even one kid carrying around his severed mother’s head like a stuffed teddy bear. Sweet.
Tyler Nichols of JoBlo says Ice Cream Man is the epitome of “turn your brain off” cinema. The critic says the characters are dumb, the acting is awful, and the humor is outdated (Mitt Romney jokes, anyone?). With so much better horror out there right now, this isn’t enough to keep today’s audiences entertained, Nichols says. He continues:
Don’t get me wrong, there are some good deaths here, but there ends up being so many that they start to just blend together. When someone’s head is being ripped off and it just feels like another day at the office, then there’s too much desensitization going on. And since the gore happens so quickly, it means the final act is the least effective of them all.
Tai Gooden of Nerdist, however, isn’t taking the movie so seriously. He says it’s a “silly splatterfest,” and if you’re a fan of Eli Roth and are OK with gore over actual scares, you’ll probably like Ice Cream Man a lot. Gooden rates it 3 stars out of 5, writing:
From top to bottom, this is very much an Eli Roth movie. There’s ample blood, gore, and levels of pure torture that start very early in the film and continuously ramp up. There are a lot of practical effects and some truly absurd and genuinely funny moments. … It is far from the deliciously twisted feast of Thanksgiving, but it’s fun enough for a Friday night watch. Overall, Ice Cream Man is brutal, bloody, and a bizarre trip that beats its premise into your brain, and will make you shudder the next time you hear the sweet sounds of that little truck.
Is there such a thing as too many kills? Some of these critics seem to think so. Overall, Ice Cream Man holds a 26% Rotten Tomatoes score, but will it go down as one of the worst horror movies of the year? Grab your ticket if you’re so inclined, because this one rolls into theaters on Friday, August 7.
