Ice Cream Man
Gregory Tudor was only a child when Butch “The Ice Cream King” Brickle was gunned down on the street outside his home, blood splattering the street alongside the frozen dairy products melting into the drain, his mother running from the house and calling his name, fearful that he was hurt, fearful of what he had witnessed, the boy taken for treatment at the Wishing Well, a facility “for the mentally disturbed,” but never fully recovering.
An adult now, he has branded himself “the Ice Cream Prince,” using Brickle’s old van to haunt the neighbourhood of Riverside, needing to be near the squabbling children who remind him of the happy time before but treating them with the same disdain with which they treat him, regarding him as “freaky, but ice cream is ice cream.” When one of their number goes missing the children immediately know who to suspect, but the police dismiss their concerns, leaving “the Rocketeers” to find evidence on their own.
A comedy horror directed by Norman Apstein from a script co-written by Sven Davison and David Dobkin released straight to video in 1995, Ice Cream Man benefits from a roster of familiar faces, An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton and Conan the Barbarian’s Sandahl Bergman as Martin and Marion Casseta, Time Bandits’ David Warner as the Reverend Langley and Damnation Alley’s Jan-Michael Vincent as Detective Gifford, conducting his investigation with indifference alongside Lee Majors II as Detective Maldwyn, undeniably the offspring of his six million dollar father.
Also no stranger to genre with appearances from Evilspeak to Terrifier 3 to say nothing of his cameos in the films of his director brother Ron and a bevy of assorted Star Trek roles, his van heralded by joyful ditties but with a face curdled by trauma, Clint Howard is the maladjusted Gregory Tudor, mingling with impressionable and easily led children who are left unsupervised by their parents, too concerned with their own jobs, lives and petty arguments, as comfortable scooping flesh as he is serving ice cream.
The adults are the backdrop however, with the film led by Justin Isfeld, Anndi McAfee, JoJo Adams and Mikey LeBeau as Johnny Spodak, Heather Langley, Chris “Tuna” Cassera and “Small” Paul Weatherly, as natural in their roles as Howard is at presenting creepy malevolence, bright children aware that their world has changed and that their parents refuse to take notice, seeing the danger of the ice cream man as akin to the Pied Piper, charming children away as though they were rats, never to be seen again.
The prosthetics of the decapitated unfortunates impressive despite the low-budget, Ice Cream Man is a difficult film to pin down, never settling for one flavour, first presenting the simple fears of childhood, needles and hospitals and being deprived of treats, than a genuinely unsettling scene of Chris lost in the towering aisles of grocery store while pursued by Tudor and Heather’s awareness her parents care more for God than her, while the adults experience the horror of the monstrous mental asylum where the unwanted are abandoned, apparently more affecting than the thought of lost children.
Ice Cream Man will be streaming on the Arrow platform from Friday 21st February
