Oh, boy. I may have hit my limit. I feel like I’ve blown my fucking mind out on bad movies this year. Here’s one so egregious I don’t even want to talk about it. You might accuse me of being too hard on this movie. Clint Howard is one of my favorite faces in the industry. This blog attests to the fact that horror-comedy is my favorite type of horror and comedy. I originally saw it when I was twelve years old, which should have been the perfect viewing age for something like this. Try showing it to a two year old and you might be able to dazzle ’em… maybe.
In its 85-minute running time there are about fifty seconds of awesome. The rest is slow, plodding, and boringly shot, not to mention entirely illogical. It’s like one of those “rad” children films that frequently turned up in video stores in the early-to-mid 90s, only there’s just a little bit of gore, which feels shoehorned in only to ensure a journalist from Fangoria showed up to take pictures on set. (The severed heads, by the way, look absolutely amazing. Everything else… oof.)
Clint Howard plays the titular ice cream man. When he was a kid, he witnessed the so-called Ice Cream King get gunned down during a drive-by shooting. His mother found her trauma-stricken boy sitting on the curb, eating an ice cream cone, mere inches from the dead body. He glanced up at her and asked, “Who’s going to bring me ice cream, Mommy?” That part was kind of funny, actually.
That’s the problem: a lot of the movie is kind of funny. It would have been much funnier if they weren’t trying so hard. It would have been a lot more watchable, too, if most of the killings didn’t take place off camera. Despite the subject matter, the movie’s so tame I don’t think they would have edited very much to show it on the USA network twenty years ago.
Anyway, now that he’s all grown up, the ice cream man kills children, grinds them up, and mixes their remains into the ice cream he sells around town. Three neighborhood kids uncover his evil scheme and take matters into their own hands. Armed with giant model rockets, they decide to finish the ice cream man, once and for all. I mean… fuck. Haven’t we seen this too many times before? It’s the same old shit, a decade too late.
So the main character, whose name is Tuna, is supposed to be fat kid. Instead of casting a tubby kid, the filmmakers cast a photogenically skinny kid and stuffed his hooded shirts with what appears to be ordinary bed pillows. The movie-long effort seems pointless until the payoff at the very end of the film: with the ice cream man dead, Tuna no longer eats so much ice cream and therefor loses all his weight. Excellent character arc, that.
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