It's summer vacation, & there's little to do in the suburbs for kids
Racer (Justin
Isfeld), Heather (Anndi
McAfee) Tuna (JoJo
Adams) & Smallpox (Mikey
LeBeau) but by icecream from the Ice Cream Man ... but
unfortunately their ice cream man Gregory (Clint Howard) is pretty much off the
hook: not only does he keep mice in his icecream, he also has the bad habit of
killing people every now & again, & soon a boy goes missing. Our kids
don't care too much though, until Tuna witnesses the ice cream man pushing
Smallpox into his truck., but when he tries to inform the grownups about it,
they show little interest, & even when Tuna eventually manages to convince
the police (led by Jan-Michael Vincent & Lee Majors II) to search
Gregory's warehouse, they come up with no evidence at all (but for some reason
stay clear from searching gregory's truck where he has a corpse stashed away). Since
this is an American film though, smallpox is not really dead (neither is the
other boy, who has been found pretty much alive eventually), but is kept by
Gregory in a cage the cops were too stupid to find, as Gregory thinks Smallpox
is the only one who understands him. On the other hand though, Gregory shows
little hesitation to kill grownups by the numbers, but noone seems to notice,
& the cops who stake him out seem to always look the other direction when
Gregory does something evil. Soon, Tuna, Heather & Racer collect evidence
of the ice cream man's evildoings on film, but somehow Racer's wannabe-cop
brother Jacob (Karl Makinen) gets his hands on the photos & decides to
bring down the Ice Cream Man himself ... but loses his head over it. Of
course it's up to the pesky kids to fight Gregory on their own in the end,
& Smallpox, who has found a way out of the cage he was kept in, delivers
the final blow when he turns a machine with giant rotating blades Gregory uses
for cutting nuts & corpses against him. Gregory's dead, but would you
have guessed it (of course you would), Smallpox might become the next Ice Cream
Man. Very pedestrian mix of visceral horror, boy detective story
& gross-out comedy - which works on none of the 3 levels: It's too
restrained to really shock, it just refuses to put the kids into any real
danger they can't manage (as Smallpox says towards the beginning about the Pied
Piper: "The kids win in the end, they always do"), & as a
comedy it's just not funny, with all the satirical elements about living in the
suburbs being much overused clichés instead of social comments. It's all not
helpedb y mainly one-dimensional characters & flat acting, especially Clint
Howard as main psycho is just godawful.
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