1995 Horror Film Ice Cream Man Streams Free on Tubi

Earlier this summer, Eli Roth released Ice Cream Man, a tedious horror movie tarnished by AI slop and cringey dialogue. It is a disappointment, not just because I expected better from the director of Cabin Fever and Thanksgiving, but because Roth also sullied the name of another schlocky horror movie with the exact same title that is much more fun to watch.

Released in 1995, Ice Cream Man is the type of bad-movie-masterpiece horror film that rarely gets made in the post-Get Out era where the genre is taken much more seriously. Directed by pornographer Paul Norman, who hoped this was his pivot to kid-friendly horror flicks, Ice Cream Man features a deranged killer who mixes bugs, human remains, and ice cream and feeds it to children. The movie also spends a remarkable amount of time showing us what shoes everyone is wearing, as per a sponsorship agreement with Converse that probably cost some poor sneaker executive his job. Norman may have wanted to escape X-rated film, but he wound up making one of the creepiest stories ever put on film.

Unlike the Eli Roth movie, the original Ice Cream Man is a B-movie horror masterpiece. If you are looking for an absurd scary movie to get into the Halloween spirit, you can do no better than this.

Ice Cream Man stars Clint Howard as Gregory Tudor, a severely troubled man who witnessed the murder of another ice cream truck driver when he was a child. Gregory winds up in a psychiatric institution where he receives treatment that verges on abuse. When he finally gets released as an adult, he buys his own ice cream truck and starts murdering people.

Howard later said he was inspired by a real-life ice cream man from his childhood who used to scream at kids while driving his truck. However, the actor’s unhinged energy makes Gregory a particularly off-putting antagonist, even before he starts chopping off heads.

In early scenes, Gregory mostly drives around selling ice cream to kids. The audience soon learns he has been mixing gross things into his ice cream, including his murder victims. Local kids start disappearing, and the ones who are left struggle to convince any adult to care.

Eventually, the cops realize something is amiss. A detective played by Jan-Michael Vincent visits the psychiatric institution where the ice cream man grew up, which leads to one of the film’s unnerving sequences of the police navigating a decrepit building full of listless psychiatric patients and doctors. It is a long scene that bounces between scary and funny as Vincent pushes his way through a crowd of zombie-like moaning people with outstretched arms.

The story ends with a final showdown in Gregory’s ice cream factory where one of his abductees, Small Paul, tricks the killer into walking into a giant stand mixer where he gets dismembered. One final scene hints that the ice cream-related trauma that fueled Gregory’s rampage may have passed on to Small Paul. Sadly, we never got a Small Paul sequel.

While the plot of Ice Cream Man is nonsensical, the story of how the movie came into existence is stranger.

It all started with Paul Norman, who directed such films as Intercourse with the Vampire, Edward Penishands, and The Erotic Adventures of the Three Musketeers under the pseudonym Norman Apstein. Norman decided to make a scary movie for kids, so he hired writers including Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin to write a draft that was initially more of a horror spoof. Norman cast known actors like Howard and Vincent to give Ice Cream Man a veneer of legitimacy, but a $2 million budget kept it firmly in B-movie territory.

Some scenes were filmed in Norman’s house, and he cast himself, his wife, and his son in bit parts. The production substituted mashed potatoes with food coloring for ice cream in many scenes to keep the dessert from melting in between takes. One child actor has a pillow stuffed under his shirt the entire time because the script says he is fat but Norman cast a skinny kid instead. Vincent was also drunk for most of the shoot. This is all revealed in the DVD and Blu-ray commentary.

Ice Cream Man debuted in Chicago at the 1995 Clint Howard Film Festival, which was a one-time-only event where three films featuring Howard screened. It did not make much of an impact at the time, and decades later, there still are not enough reviews out there to merit a Rotten Tomatoes score. However, Ice Cream Man became a cult classic thanks to physical media and horror fans.

There has also been talk of a sequel in recent years. In 2014, Howard helped back a Kickstarter campaign for a new movie, which set out to raise $300,000 and fell short by collecting just $4,000. The actor announced in 2025 that work had begun on a sequel in which he would play a new ice cream man, promising the film would explain some of the original’s weirder plot elements.

Whether that sequel ever materializes remains to be seen, although after the damage Eli Roth did to the Ice Cream Man brand, we need the return of Howard’s serial killer now more than ever. Either way, nobody can take away the chaotic beauty of the original film.

Ice Cream Man is streaming for free on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Roku.

Source: Polygon