‘Ice Cream Man’ is really a one-note horror film, although buried somewhere beneath all the gore is an idea that might have made for something considerably more interesting. It takes place in a small town haunted by something terrible that happened in its past, which immediately brings to mind ‘Halloween’, ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ and particularly John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’. In these films, the apparent security of small-town America is undermined by the discovery that the sins of one generation have not disappeared at all: sooner or later, somebody has to pay for what the forefathers did.

The variation here is that an ice cream man who was previously killed by members of the community returns from the dead and begins selling poisonous ice cream to the local children. Once they consume it, they turn homicidal and begin attacking the adults. There are obvious echoes of ‘Weapons’ as well in the spectacle of children running amok and becoming a threat to the grown-ups who would ordinarily be responsible for protecting them.

And that is probably the creepiest aspect of the whole thing. This is essentially a film about young children, but one made with an 18 certificate firmly in mind. Innocence becomes the vehicle through which the adults are punished.

Unfortunately, the film is interested principally in the possibilities this creates for gore.

Everyone is effectively fodder for death and there is little sense of character, motivation or even moral consequence. It makes for an interesting contrast with something like ‘Cape Fear’, which also involves a family being targeted because of events in the past. Scorsese uses the threat to force his characters to confront their guilt and the things they have refused to acknowledge about themselves. ‘Ice Cream Man’ has the beginnings of a similar idea about communal responsibility but does virtually nothing with it. Instead, it is all horribly predictable.

The centrepiece is effectively a high-school massacre conducted in broad daylight. Firefighters, emergency workers and assorted authority figures are stamped on, run over, butchered and massacred by children. Perhaps we’re supposed to enjoy the transgressive comedy of seeing the normal hierarchy between adults and children overturned, but I found myself wondering: is this actually funny? There is so little underneath the violence that after a while the escalating carnage becomes monotonous rather than shocking.

There is an intriguing religious element which the film again fails to develop. The children end up in a church basement, but rather than the church functioning as a place of sanctuary, it appears to be connected with the source of the Ice Cream Man’s activities. There might be a subliminal point here about institutions that are supposed to protect children instead becoming spaces in which they are corrupted, but the film never seems sufficiently interested in its own ideas to explore them.

Strangely, it also made me think of the imagery associated with epidemics such as AIDS or Covid. The contaminated ice cream behaves almost like an infection: consume it and transformation follows almost immediately. There is even a character who appears to have an accidental form of protection because of being lactose intolerant. Other children are force-fed the ice cream and effectively become zombies. Innocuous everyday contact suddenly carries the possibility of contamination.

There could have been something quite disturbing in that idea. Ice cream is associated with childhood, summer, treats and pleasure; here it becomes the mechanism through which children are transformed into killers. The familiar ice cream man, another supposedly benign figure from childhood, becomes an emissary of death.

But ‘Ice Cream Man’ doesn’t really pursue any of this. It simply keeps killing people.

And then everyone dies.

That’s essentially it. There is no meaningful reckoning, no sense that the community has learned anything and no particularly satisfying explanation of what all this destruction has been for. If ‘The Fog’ uses supernatural revenge to explore the way communities are built upon buried historical crimes, ‘Ice Cream Man’ takes a superficially similar premise and reduces it to irredeemable gore for the sake of gore.

It is ultimately a shaggy-dog story – except this one is very definitely vanilla.