Ice Cream Man tells the tale of a bunch of kids in suburban America, friends Johnny Spodak (Justin Isfeld), Heather Langley (Anndi McAfee), Chris 'Tuna' Cassera (Jojo Adams) & Small Paul (Mikey LeBeau) are just your average group of adolescent mates who enjoy messing around, having a laugh & buying ice cream from the ice cream man (Clint Howard) who drives around in his ice cream van. However Gregory is a new ice cream man & there's something not right about him, maybe it's the fact that he had huge syringe's of green goo injected into his head when he was younger as part of his 'treatment' in Wishing Wells mental hospital? Maybe it's the fact he kills dogs & puts them though a food crusher? Maybe it's because he drives around with various body parts, eyeballs & combat knives in the back of his van? Or maybe it has something to do with the disturbing fact he makes his ice cream of people he kills? It's up to detectives Gifford (Jan-Michael Vincent) & Maldwyn (LeeMajors II) to try & discover what's happening to all the missing people...

Produced & directed by Paul Norman as Norman Apstein I though Ice Cream Man had potential that it didn't really live up to. The script by Sven Davison & David Dobkin has an intriguing premise, one that has that juxtaposition where ice cream men are considered good & deal with children all the time & this film turns the ice cream man into an evil killer. The film definitely does't take itself seriously & at times feels like a spoof, however the film-making is uneven & the horror, comedy & spoof elements seem almost random & don't gel that well. There are a few amusing moments in it like after having killed & used a local woman for ice cream ingredients Gregory finds a female condom in the bottom of his bowl, there are one or two gross moments in it like close-ups of people eating ice cream with eyeballs in but for the most part once I got over the initial premise I found it rather dull, pedestrian & boring. If it wasn't for the ice cream man turned killer gimmick this film would have nothing going for it, nothing at all. Some of the ice cream related one liners & twisted imagery paper over the cracks but underneath this is a poor film that runs out of ideas very quickly. The character's are alright, the kids weren't as annoying as I'd expected & while the parents are given some background & story to start with they are quickly forgotten & don't feature at all in the second half of the film.

Director Norman, or should that be Apstein, judging by his IMDb profile is far more used to porn & has over 100 credited to him including being responsible for the Edward Penishands (1991) series, he also seems to have appeared in the classic British horror film Village of the Damned (1960) as one of the village children, amazing eh? The film has a reasonable level of competence & it has a few memorable scenes but there's nothing spectacular here. In case your wondering no children at all are killed in Ice Cream Man. Gore wise things are OK, there's various body parts & eyeballs, someone has a spike stuck through their chin & it exits from the top of their head & there's a few impressive decapitated heads including one in an over-sized ice cream cone...

With a supposed budget of about $2,000,000 which is a fair amount Ice Cream Man is generally well made but nothing special, apparently according to the IMDb's 'Trivia' section it was sponsored by a shoe company & that it has a 'extraordinary number of shots of shoes', I must admit I can only remember one & the low level shots of peoples feet as Tuna hides under a shelf in the supermarket. Anyway, what difference does it make. The cast here is surprisingly good, Clint Howard, Jan-Michael Vincent, Olivia Hussey, David Warner, David Naughton & Lee Major's son! Unfortunately they aren't used that well & a potentially great cast is somewhat wasted.

Ice Cream Man has an attention grabbing title & central premise that once you get past there is actually very little here to like or recommend, a valiant effort at something a bit different but it doesn't quite come off.

Here's a film that will chill you to the bone, or maybe just leave you cold. Ice Cream Man is two scoops of scary fun from the good old days when R-rated movies were marketed to children. When kids hear this ice cream truck coming, they run...for their lives! It may not be the cream of the crop but could leave you frozen with fear.

Ron Howard's brother plays an overtly creepy Ice Cream Man. From behind the barred windows of his ice cream truck, he doles out ice cream from bloody, pest ridden tubs and commits the occasional murder. Soon his antics attract the attention of the neighborhood kids as well as two police detectives played by Jean Michael Vincent and Lee Majors II. Will the ice cream man's dreams of having a shop of his own melt away under the heat of his own un-cone-trollable killing sprees?

Clint Howard is well cast as a murderous creep. He inhabits the role the way a hand inhabits a mitten. Similar in style to Peewee's Big Adventure and Serial Mom: upright and proper suburban facades concealing abnormality, the way my t-shirt hides a dark underbelly. Violent scenes are few and not very explicit. If anything it's worth watching just to see Clint Howard hamming it up.

85 Minutes Campy Horror 4.5/10 flavors of slow-churned, creamy murder

You can see that if the flick ain't directed by his brother, this is the best he can do. And sad to say, his best just doesn't cut it. "Ice Cream Man" is a very bizarre horror film, that's a real blast to watch if you're in the right mood. In the wrong mood, it has been known to cause people to lash out violently at loved ones, so please, watch with caution.

Clint Howard stars (Does anything really star Clint Howard though?) as the "evil" "psychotic" "bizarre" (Yes all in quotes, he's not quite any of these, but he's getting close) ice cream man, who tortures the local children with bomb pops that are really melty and ice cream that has chopped up humans and dogs in them. Ick.

Anyway, the plot's really just an excuse to show of the...well, the...um, well it's a plot. Oh wait, I know! It's an excuse to show off all the loser actor cameos! There's Jan Michael Vincent and Lee Majors II (The sequel?) as cops tracking the elusive man o' ice cream. And even Doug Lleyweln appears as a supermarket clerk.

Even better than that, are some of the bizarre goofs in the film. I really like the fact that for some reason, instead of hiring a fat actor to play the unhappy "fat" kid of the group, they just make this one kid wearing padding under his clothes. And the entire premise that anyone would by scoops of ice cream from a ice cream man. Who buys ice cream scoops from the ice cream man? Then there's the entire psychiatric ward scene, in which Jan Michael Vincent's acting ranges from mildly interested, to bored beyond the state of consciousness. These are the cops who also scour the Ice Cream Man's place for clues but manage to complete gloss over the ice cream truck (where, of course, the various bodies and such are kept). Oh well, better luck next time troops.

Howard himself overacts like he's making sure people two towns over can see and hear him. It's all just plain dumb. And fairly fun to laugh at in the fine tradition of The Pumaman or Gymkata. You'll have a GOOD laugh with the right sense of HUMOR. I love that one.