Harefooted Halloween: Ice Cream Man

What I Liked: Everything

What I Didn’t Like: Everything

Overall Impressions: My usual format won’t really work with this one because it’s a campy low budget B horror movie that falls under so bad it’s good. 

Clint Howard (Backdraft) is a psychotic ice cream man who kills people and incorporates their remains into his hard pack ice cream.  So to play it safe you should get a prepackaged item from him.  Or don’t buy anything from this guy in the first place.  Yea, that’s probably the best thing to do.

There’s a lot to love here particularly Howard’s maniacal performance where he constantly looks surprised and crazed, acts like a little kid, walks with a hunched over shuffle and speaks in a scruffy voice (he screamed on his way to the set every day to get his throat raspy).  There’s also a scene where he dances by himself next to his truck in an empty back alley to no music.  Oh, and another scene where he plants two severed heads on sticks and has them talk to each other like he’s playing with some action figures.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the plethora of bizarre shit in this picture.  Howard kills a guy with a waffle iron and then places his head in a giant waffle cone, he puts an eyeball in someone’s rocky road scoop, there’s a mental hospital that gets overrun by the unstable patients, the filmmakers wanted one of the kid characters to be fat but decided to cast a slim kid and clearly just stuffed a pillow in his shirt, there’s a rich sultry blonde who wants to get with the ice cream man for some unknown reason, the black and white opening depicts a mob hit on an ice cream man in the 50’s, the title is simply “Ice Cream Man” without any “The” and etc.

This is director Paul Norman’s (credited as Norman Apstein) only non-porn feature which is pretty interesting.  I mean I can’t tell if he was trying to break into more mainstream filmmaking and this was a serious effort or if he intentionally made a goofy as shit horror film.  Either way it’s a fun watch.  It won’t make you think of ice cream men or their trucks the same way again.