I Watched Ice Cream Man 2026, and Now I Need to Lie Down

Eli Roth made a movie - god help us all

My LDR called me the second the credits rolled on whatever he’d gone to see, with the kind of energy people save for winning the lottery. “You HAVE to watch this trailer.” So I opened YouTube, hit play, and something happened to me. Cursed ice cream. Feral children. A silent freak in a paper hat dragging kids into hell. I gazed. I loved. I spoke to him like a woman possessed and told him I was absolutely going to watch this thing.

Reader, I should have listened to the internet before I got my hopes up. Ice Cream Man 2026 came out and got dragged from every direction the second it dropped, which felt weird to me because the premise slaps and I love a schlocky gore fest more than most emotionally regulated people.

But I was locked in. I had committed my whole heart to this stupid movie. So I sat down, hit play, and prepared to have the time of my life. Some of that happened. A lot of it did not.

TMJ Rating: 🍦🍦/5

What You Need to Know

An evil ice cream man rolls into a sleepy suburban town in a bright truck playing the exact melody your brain has been trained to associate with childhood joy.

He hands out cursed ice cream. The kids who eat it turn into tiny homicidal maniacs and start taking every adult in sight apart. Three kids somehow avoid the frozen curse (one is lactose intolerant, iconic ofc) and spend the movie running from their former classmates while trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Ari Millen plays the Ice Cream Man. He never speaks, does everything with his face, and if you’re catching Art the Clown flashbacks, congratulations, so did everyone else with a working set of eyes. Eli Roth casts himself as the dad because he simply cannot help himself. Read It: Welcome to Derry - Pennywise’s Origin Story

The Gore Genuinely ATE

If you came for carnage, you will be fed. There’s a long stretch in the middle of the movie that felt like nothing but kill after kill after kill. Skulls popped open like Easter eggs. Brain-scooping with a literal ice cream scoop. Intestines used as jump ropes. Blood angels smeared into the driveway. I cackled loud enough that my dog gave me a weird look.

Charlie Storey, who plays Piper, the little girl serving as the neighborhood’s most enthusiastic murder toddler, deserves whatever she wants for the rest of her life. Give her a franchise. Give her a Barbie doll. She’s the reason to sit through this thing. Every time she was on screen, I felt like I was watching a career starting.

The color palette also rules. Pastels, neons, blood reds bright enough to give you a migraine in the best way. Very much my aesthetic.

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Where Ice Cream Man 2026 Falls Apart

The script reads like Eli Roth wrote it in a Denny’s booth in 1997 and never went back to fix it. Dialogue clanks. Jokes land like wet laundry. There’s a family dinner scene where his character makes a horny comment regarding teenage girls in swimsuits, and I aged 15 years in three seconds. Sir. You are 54. You are already on thin ice with the entire internet. Read the room, my god.

Then there’s the moment where the 12-year-old girl says something to the effect of “I’m a 12-year-old girl, of course I know how to make myself throw up.” I paused the movie and stared into the middle distance for a full minute. I forgave nothing. Who greenlit that line? Who said, “Yes, let’s shoot this”

Also, and this one stings, they used generative AI on parts of the movie. Some of the animated cell phone sequences. Some of the flashback shots. A credited VFX artist confirmed it after Eli flip-flopped on the record and pretended he’d drawn everything himself.

For a filmmaker who’s built a whole brand on practical effects and championing indie artists, that’s humiliating. I clocked a few shots as janky in the moment and gave them the benefit of the doubt. My gut was right, and I hate it here.

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My Thoughts

The gore is legitimately fun, and Charlie Story is a star. The ending goes somewhere ballsy. But the script is a first draft with a nosebleed, the AI use is inexcusable, and every scene with Eli Roth on camera made me want to walk into the sea.

If you love schlock and you can flip your brain to airplane mode, you might have a decent time. If you have even mild respect for craft or human VFX artists, just skip it. Watch Weapons or the newest Insidious instead.

Have you sat through this train wreck yet? Are you also feral over the AI thing? Are you a Piper stan yet or do I need to convert you? Come scream at me in the comments; I need to process this with people who understand.