Ice Cream Everyday

A few years ago, Beth showed me a movie her family had found in the video store some time before that, the 1995 film Ice Cream Man. It stars Clint Howard as a former mental patient who’s now a murderous ice cream man. It’s one of those movies that’s so bad it’s funny, one example of its poor quality being that a fat kid simply has a pillow shoved into his shirt. What I didn’t realize until recently was that there were actually other movies that used the idea of a psychotic ice cream man. One was We All Scream for Ice Cream, released in 2007 as part of the Masters of Horror series.

The story for this one, which is apparently based on a short story, is that the neighborhood kids, goaded by the local bully, pull a prank on the mentally retarded ice cream man that ends up killing him. When the kids are all grown up with families of their own, he comes back as a ghost and serves their kids some sort of voodoo ice cream that causes their parents to melt. Yeah, they die by melting away like ice cream, leaving only their clothes behind.

Another film with a similar premise was Mr. Ice Cream Man, actually made before the Clint Howard movie but not released until afterward.

We watched this one last night, and it seriously makes the Clint Howard one look like a masterpiece. It’s entirely filmed on a handheld digital camera, and the action and dialogue are more stilted than in local commercials. It’s once again about an ice cream man who’s a murderer, an added twist this time being that he’s the father of one of the neighborhood boys, having raped his mother who then died in childbirth. Not that this revelation has any particular impact on the plot. This also has a dumb fat kid, who’s either eating or talking about eating in pretty much every scene he’s in. There’s a review of this stinker up at Something Awful, which does a good job at summarizing the film and explaining why it’s so bad. I can recommend the Clint Howard movie as an amusingly bad piece of cinema, but unless you have some need to see every film involving murderous ice cream men, I’d give the other two a miss.

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