Ice Cream Man. Norman Apstein (as Paul Norman), 1994.
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Edition screened: Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray #198, released 2017. English language. Runtime approximately 86 minutes.
Summary: Murder and mutilation of a dog
Details:
1) A neighbor’s barking dog confronts Clint Howard around 8:28. At 8:53 Howard produces an orange push-up confection that conceals a hidden switchblade. It looks a little like the thing in Marilyn Chambers’ armpit in Rabid. We hear the dog yelp off camera at 8:58.
2) We return to the dog’s bloody corpse at 10:05 and the body pushed into a large meat grinder through 10:15. Cut to meatloaf coming out of the oven.
Similar to The Corpse Grinders, Ice Cream Man is a pretty crappy movie made sporadically intriguing by the inclusion of strange and pointless details. Casting in The Corpse Grinders includes an office secretary who happens to be a mute amputee in a cheap fright wig, all for no reason and without mention, and the grave-digger’s haggard wife constantly coddles a baby doll without comment or context. Ice Cream Man is devoted to closeups of children’s footwear, often canvas Chuck Taylors, and we are treated to commercial-style shots of purple and red Converse high tops during plot dialogue. Since the ICM himself is a twisted killer, you could propose that these images of footwear are glimpses into his preoccupations, and I’d say Oh okay, I knew you were going to say that. But how about the minister who gets stigmata during his sermon and his wife who speaks in tongues while sitting in the living room, not mentioned and barely mentioned, respectively?
At best, these films might show a free-wheeling audacity; the nerve to play Herzog and just include local images that seem interesting. At worst (and more likely) these directors realize that their films are destined to be terrible, and clutch frantically at some Herschell Gordon Lewis straw, hoping to claim later that all the stupidity was self-conscious, post-modern, tongue-in cheek, or some other lie.