Ice Cream Man

Here is what is actually on the record, because the rest of this post depends on you knowing it.

Viewers found Dark Half, an AI visual effects studio, in the credits. Roth had told Polygon the stylized animated sequence started from his own drawings and was refined by animators, in an early Mickey Mouse and Fleischer Studios style. After the questions kept coming he issued a statement saying he had misspoke, and that AI was used in "a very small portion of a few scenes in the film." He has never said which scenes, or how much of the cartoon sequence was generated. Practical effects are also in the film. Deadline, Variety and TheWrap all covered it in August 2026.

So nobody outside that production knows which shots are which. Everything I call out below is a visual call, not knowledge. It is me watching cold and marking what looks generated to my eye, against a film whose director has confirmed some of it is and will not say where. I could be wrong on any individual shot and I am telling you that up front rather than at the bottom.

The town looks like it never went past 1955, but it is definitely current because of the cars and phones and shit. The town itself, the buildings, the general look and feel, is stuck in a time capsule.

You can also tell that these houses on the neighborhood streets are shell casings of houses.

Early in, the ice cream head following the kid as he walks around the truck is funny. So far the movie is acted terribly, but it is supposed to be a b-flick, and Roth is not one for the big top tier shit either. He likes the grimy shit.

Revising that as it goes. Roth still has his acting chops, and the person they got to play the mom is decent. The scene around the dinner table was a bit better. I feel like a lot of the kids they got for this movie have never done this before.

First kill and gore scene hits and it looks practical.

First call: the hand in the garbage disposal, with the setting of the dad on fire. Second call: the fishbowl on the head.

Cutting the principal's head off and feeding him his own brain was a mix between practical and computer blood effects. They cut the top of his head off to expose the top of his brain, and it was definitely what looked like regular ballistics gel they were scooping into cones and making the principal eat.

The main call: the little cartoon thought bubbles that pop up every once in a while. They look a bit off. They did not even bother to blend the edges to soften them into the film.

Another call: some of the ice cream goop makeup on the kids' faces. You can see it move around a bit at the edges of where the makeup is at on the chin, and it doesn't blend like it should.

And all the fire.

That edge business is the whole tell, and it is worth saying plainly because it is the part that is about craft rather than about technology. Anything added to a plate has to be married into it, and marrying it is the work: matching the grain, matching the light falling on it, softening the boundary so your eye cannot find where the addition starts. When the edge stays crisp against a soft image, or when a thing that should be locked to a chin drifts a few pixels against that chin, the integration pass is missing. That is not a statement about what tool made it. It is a statement about nobody finishing it.

The practicals are not all that great quality either, with one exception. They must have spent a fuckton of money on that practical head of Roth's, because it looked really good in comparison to everything else.

And before anybody waves the credits at me: the prosthetic makeup here is Steve Newburn and Adrien Morot, and Morot won the Oscar for The Whale. Just because you can build and maintain a fat suit well enough to win an Academy Award for it does not mean you can do the ice cream shit on a kid's face in a static and believable manner. They are not the same job. One is a sculpted appliance you fit and keep consistent across a shoot. The other has to sit on a moving face, hold its edge while that face talks and runs, and never once look like it is sitting on top of the kid.

The shaky camera is annoying as fuck, but there is a lot of running in this, and I am sure it helps to scare the kids to have a couple of dudes chasing them around with a shoulder camera, probably dressed like clowns or zombies or some shit.

They are also not actually driving. They are being pulled along.

The smoking. I hate when they tell people to smoke in movies who have never even held a cigarette in real life. It looks so goddamn bad. They either need to find a new thing to make the kid look defiant or rebellious, or just make them actually smoke like they used to.

Grave digging, in every movie, not just this one. I hate it. They always make the area around the coffin so clean and free of debris, and it does not look like that.

The church joke. I think it is funny that Roth made the pedo joke on the church, and they blamed it on the ice cream man for why the dude is turning all the kids into fucked up monsters.

I thought it was clever that they made the kids kill the mom and dad in the grave, and they chopped Roth's head off.