Review: Ice Cream Man

Ice cream that stares back? What a frosty treat!

It's not very often that a movie is so fucking awful that I cannot bring myself to finish it, but Paul Norman's 1995 horror-comedy, Ice Cream Man just stunk. We're talking "The Critics Simply Say, 'Shit Sandwich'" levels of stink here.

Having just checked the film legacy of Paul Norman, I actually now feel sorry for him. The most recent thing on his IMDb page is a piece of pure class called Sperm Bitches. I didn't have the patience to go through all 118 of his films, but I'm going to take a guess and say that this was his only mainstream, non-porno movie.

I just imagine Paul Norman on the set of this flick every day freaking out about how good it needed to be so that he could become a "real" director and break free of the porno industry. I mean, he even went so far as to work with kids for this film! (I wonder if the parents knew of Paul Norman's CV.) I imagine Paul begrudgingly signing the film over to a straight-to-video distributor and then, when the movie tanked, he shrugs sadly to himself and sighs, "Back to money shots..."

As a side note, this film was co-written by David Dobkin, director of Wedding Crashers. I wonder if he and Paul trade Xmas cards.

On to my review of the first 45 minutes of what could've been 84 minutes of pure misery!

We start out with the obligatory flashback of why Gregory (Clint Howard) is a fucked-up individual. You know you're watching a flashback because everything is in black and white. Apparently, the ice cream man of Greg's youth is gunned down in a drug-related drive by shooting. This takes place in an upper middle-class neighborhood where as we all know, drug-related drive-by shootings are an epidemic. Young, soon-to-be-batshit-crazy Gregory is first to the body. He sits on the curb, takes a push-up pop out of the murdered ice cream man's hand and proceeds to eat it. When his mother rushes to him, all the boy can say is, "Who's going to bring the ice cream now?" This is how we're to know he's now officially batshit.

Flashback and some pointless exposition out of the way, we come to the present day where dorky children mob the ice cream truck. Gregory is now the ice cream man, but instead of getting shot in those upper middle-class drive-bys, he just keeps rats and other filth with the ice cream. You know the rats are bad thanks to the synthesizer score mimicking the Bernard Herrman soundtrack to Psycho. Apparently, Gregory's childhood trauma has only caused him to have a flagrant disregard for food sanitation laws instead of becoming a homicidal psychotic as the movie's poster would have us believe.

The heroes of this tale of suburban terror are four children. You have the small, nerdy kid named Small Paul. You have the fat kid named Tuna. Then you have two more kids, but they're pretty normal sized, so you forget them pretty quick. Actually, the kid playing Tuna isn't really fat, so throughout the movie, his shirts are all stuffed with padding in order to give him bulk. Fat suit technology wasn't available yet in 1995, so tons of toilet paper had to fill the girth. (Despite Tuna's "obesity", the character does an amazing amount of cardio with all the running and biking he does throughout the film. Must be a low metabolism.)

During the first half hour, we're led to believe that Gregory has murdered two children, but then it's revealed that both kids are alive. Instead, Gregory has only killed a creepy trash collector and a barking dog. He also puts an eyeball in a cop's ice cream cone.

So the kids that he's supposed to have killed aren't killed and we never see him kill anyone else during the 45 minutes I watched. What the hell's the point? Obviously, Gregory is no threat to our main heroes, so what are the stakes? Some E. Coli poisoning from rat turds in the butter pecan?

Having passed the halfway point and watching a very awkward pursuit in a carpeted grocery store (complete with Doug Llewelyn cameo), I just couldn't take any more. I just couldn't.

I had known that this film would be bad, but I hoped that it would be bad in a fun way, not bad in a "what the fuck were they thinking?" way. This is not worth seeing, even for camp. Who knows, maybe Paul Norman has improved in the past decade and Sperm Bitches is a cinematic masterpiece. Then again, maybe not.