LOS ANGELES, Aug. 4 (UPI) — Ice Cream Man, in theaters Friday, is a playfully gory horror movie. It is as graphic and intense as writer/director Eli Roth’s Hostel movies but applied to a good-naturedly macabre romp.

An ice cream man (Ari Millen) arrives in Bayleen Bay. After he serves the town children, the kids start murdering the adults.

Lactose-intolerant, bullied 12-year-old Jared Mayfair (Charlie Zeltzer) is one of the only unaffected kids, along with Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman) and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly). The trio attempts to connect with Jared’s sister Lizzie (Sarah Abbott) and her ex, Chris (Dylan Hawco) and escape town.

When the kids start killing, their murders are comically violent. The adults freak out in a panic, which is funny but also proportionate to the graphic dismemberment they’re witnessing and/or experiencing.

It’s also funny because adults don’t suspect kids are a danger, so they’re caught off guard, even by kindergarteners. Teachers step in to help, only to get killed using school paraphernalia or ice cream-related weapons.

Most of the kills appear to be practical prosthetics by Applied Arts and FX and makeup by Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot. So they’ve evolved from the glory days of Fangoria.

The only shots that look like digital effects are ones where it would be unsafe to involve child actors. The children’s zombie silence in class is also creepy.

Horror has a history of children turned killers from The Bad Seed to Village of the Damned. Roth is an expert in those and other horror tropes, such as the few kids who didn’t or couldn’t eat the ice cream being pursued by the pod-people-like kids to consume with it.

The film also deals with occult mythology and children paying for their parents’ sins. Roth, co-writing with Noah Belson, has fun gently mocking how elaborate the mythology gets, via the frustrated priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) who has to explain it all.

Roth also knows most horror fans have the same references. So he plays with expectations and still has some surprises in store.

There seems to be some unspoken ice cream mythology too. It brings some zombie kids back from the dead for more killing, and they need to keep eating it, making them ravenous. It suggests there could be as many Ice Cream Man sequels as Halloween or Friday the 13th.

Roth is also dabbling in taboos, not only with preteens and violence. Between imagery, themes and those same kids using harsh language, Roth is pushing buttons with the same edge as his early films.

That the main setting is a school, where unacceptable real-life violence continues to occur, must be intentional and surely Roth is against continued school violence.

The kids swear and talk dirty like real kids do, but there’s more than that. They speak to deeper social trauma inflicted on children. The trio of non-dairy survivors are endearing to follow.

Ice Cream Man successfully turns a beloved wholesome figure into a creepy instrument of death and transgression. It’s all in good fun but not frivolous. Ice Cream Man has something to say about both horror movies and condescending toward mature children.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.