Clint Howard is the greatest cameo actor of all time. He is a fantastic character actor and has stolen the show plenty of times while being in the supporting cast (YOU LOSE THE RACE, YOU LOSE YOUR CAR!), but his superpower has been in short appearances that make you go “It’s Clint!” That’s a lot due to his brother being one of the most successful director’s of all time and always gives his older brother a bit part. It’s also due to the fact that Clint Howard is great.
That’s why it’s sad that he has only been the star of two films. The 1981 technodemonthriller “Evilspeak” and this film, “Ice Cream Man.”
“Ice Cream Man” is an aggressively 90s horror flick from the era of “throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks as the new -Freddy.” We got an endless amount of slasher villains during that glorious pre-Scream time. Dr. Giggles, the Dentist, Rumpelstiltskin, Pinocchio, and Jack Frost just to name a few. Well, and of course Ice Cream Man.
The flick also has the extra 90s feel of the children’s horror anthologies series that were popular at the time. It could be an episode of “Goosepumps” or “Are You Afraid of the Dark,” or perhaps rather “Tales from the Crypt” since it has blood and gore. It has a very much made-for-TV vibe though was made-for-video, it even has fade-to-black transitions for ads.
The titular character, portrayed by Clint Howard, is, as the name suggests, an ice cream man. He drives around the same neighbourhood, killing and selling children icy treats, that often features gore from his bloody victims. Why does he kill? Well, when he was a kid he saw his local ice cream man gunned down and was sent to some sort of asylum where they injected green goo into his brain with a giant syringe.
In a Stephen King fashion, the only hope the town has against this menace are four children. We have the cute boy and cute girl, “My Girls” Macaulay Culkin and a thin kid with a pillow underneath his shirt so he looks fat. No, really. That’s why the “fat” kid looks so odd.
Well, everything is odd in “Ice Cream Man.” Like Derry, Maine, the town itself appears to be under some kind of spell. The parents seem pretty nonchalant about the disappearing children, nobody appears to know the iron taste of blood and the priest literally has stigmata. Some of the adults are played by known faces, like the American werewolf David Naughton and David Warner.
The kids are also morons. One of their friend is captured by the Ice Cream Man and they see him kill people and hide their bodies. “Oh, the police would never believe them!” you might exclaim, but we also follow a couple of detectives who know that the dude is a murderer. They would have loved to have a chat with those dumb kids!
At times it appears as it’s directed by somebody who might only know how to direct something else… well, it is directed by a dude who directed 128 other films. The thing is, “Ice Cream Man” is the only film he made that wasn’t a straight-to-video porno. His other masterpieces include “Intercourse with the Vampire” and its sequel, “Bad Girls 5: Maximum Babes,” and “The Erotic Adventures of the Three Musketeers.”
The utter weirdness of everything makes the film delightful. Add on Clint, and you got a Bonafide cult classic.
