We All Scream for Ice Cream

--Reviewed by Lindy Loo

Plotline: A man returns to his home-town with his family, only to find that the town (and his childhood gang of friends) are being haunted by a creepy-clown ice-cream man that they'd done wrong to. If the child of one of the aforementioned men bites into the "special ice cream" that the creepy clown ice-cream man is selling, their father melts into a puddle of ice cream.

Scariness factor: Not so much. I just kept thinking, seriously: that little ice cream jingle? Moreso irritating than scary.



Gross-Out Factor: The people die by melting into ice cream, so for the most part, not too gross. Though there IS one inexplicable slow-melting-of-flesh scene that could make one a bit squeamish.

Complaints: The movie wasn't terrible, it just wasn't anything amazingly impressive. The acting is fairly cardboard. The plot-line is a little bit weird and farfetched: Did the boys never get punished for killing somebody? Why does no one else seem to notice the ice cream truck that comes in the night accompanied by billowing clouds of smoke? And it just really wasn't that spooky. I tend to think that if YOU as the viewer wouldn't be threatened by the situation if placed in the movie (which, in this case, we wouldn't, since we weren't a member of the boy-gang that killed the ice cream man), it's hard to feel quite so threatened by the events taking place. The worst part, however, of the whole movie was the stupid repetition of the trying-to-be-creepy "I scream, You scream, We all scream for ice cream" jingle.

High Points: The first scene where you realize that the people die by melting into a pool of ice cream was pretty damn sweet--I dug the special fx in it. There were also a few decent campy moments, though pretty few and far between.



Overall: It's a short flick--only 60 minutes--so if you're intrigued by the notion of death-by-ice-cream, then you should check it out. Otherwise, if you don't ever end up seeing it, it won't be too big a loss.

Grade: C