ICE CREAM MAN
August 28th 2006
this weekend, i watched Ice Cream Man. ok, this movie was sponsored by Converse, and you won't have any trouble figuring that one out. in fact, some of the characters themselves are actually played BY converse shoes. simply amazing. honestly, i should skip the summary/review on this movie, and you should just go rent it. or buy it, even. there's a short scene in the movie with this REALLY awesome clown, and i tried to find it on google for you, but this was the best i could do. yeah, i know those aren't clowns! well, one is, but who cares? you should be watching Ice Cream Man right now, not reading my lame blog.
the movie starts out with an ice cream man getting killed in a drive by because i guess he was a drug dealer. i don't care, really. what i do care about is Clint Howard's awesome portrayal of Gregory the Ice Cream Man, who witnessed the drive by when he was a kid. yeah, he saw it all go down, then walked over to his dead hero's face-down, cooling-in-the-gutter body, unemotionally taking that final ice cream cone from the corpse's dead hands...
apparently, his parents thought he needed therapy, so they sent him to happy time fun fun mental academy, which caused random flashbacks of virtually the same scene a few times throughout the movie. these involve a needle about 10 inches long being stuck in his head, and green glop being impossibly injected, while a mad doktor raves about happy days. not the show, but, like, actually happy days.
now, grown up and crazy, Gregory lives amidst plastic daisies in the yard of his caretaker, Nurse Wharton, who looks like she's in her mid 20's maybe, but she's supposed to be, like, 70. totally absurd. wow, according to her profile, Olivia Hussey was around 44 years old in this movie. you totally can't tell, but maybe that's because she's obviously not the age she's playing, so by comparison, she looks a lot younger... so, what now? oh, yeah, Gregory rents out the ice cream lair of the dead ice cream King from Nurse Wharton, because i guess she somehow owns it, but that's never really explained.
the guy who made this movie normally makes pornos, so it stands to reason he's not normally interested in things like Plots and making sense.
also in this story is a group of kids, and the main one is named Tuna. he wears a pillow in his shirt through the whole movie so you'll think he's fat. i mean, they couldn't get a fat kid for the movie, so they took a normal kid and put him in a low budget fat suit (a pillow, i swear to god). many times, Tuna's fat chest will move around in ways fat won't, and more often than not, it is shifted weird, so like, there's a shelf under his collar bones where the pillow just isn't up all the way. he can also run a lot without getting winded, even though he's fat.
Gregory himself is a bit of a mystery. he kills an old man, and he kidnaps some kids, but then it turns out that he doesn't murder the children. he just drops them off in the woods, maybe. i don't know. he stole a kid at one point, and that kid turned up in the woods with no other explanation. Tuna just found him, and he was like "oh, hey." then they ran away from Gregory. ok.
also, we never see him kill the old man. but, i guess he kills some people, because he uses their body parts to make ice cream, yet NO ONE SEEMS TO NOTICE. dood, he puts eyeballs in the icecream and makes wafflecones out of human flesh. plus, there's blood all over pretty much everything, but people eat it anyway, lining up en masse for more. maybe it was supposed to be a commentary on amerikan culture?
anyway, the cops investigate Gregory when a second kid goes missing. freaking Jan-Michael Vincent leads the "search" in Gregory's ice cream factory. "search." the cops go in, they break everything made of glass, flip anything over that will flip over, and look inside some bowls. pretty much anywhere a body or a kid wouldn't be. then they leave, and Gregory's place is in shambles. Gregory fishes the kid out of his hiding spot, which is hidden behind an obviously movable piece of metal or something. the kid takes a liking to Greg the ice cream Prince, and they make various batches together, one of which involves the local skank.
the cops decide that maybe the kids are right and head off to the happy mental academy, where they get attacked by zombies while the mad doktor dances off, laughing in the halls. this is one of the best scenes ever. somehow, the cops get split up, and Jan-Michael WALKS for like, 20 minutes, through a funhouse while madmen follow him around and act like paid actors who aren't paid very much. the movie fails to mention how, in this small suburb, this clearly disfunctional asylum has maintained operational capacity all these years. i like to think that maybe adam west is probably the mayor. mayor of the suburb. sure.
Gregory kills some of the low-level cops and Tuna's brother, i think, and Tuna's brother's girlfriend, but then the apprentice kid lures him back into the factory and knocks him into the mixer, where he is chopped up and dies. oh, right, this apprentice kid's name is Small Paul. sorry. i remembered that because it reminded me of Paul Mall (Trimaxion, ok? bah), probably due to the rhyming.
yeah, ok, so everyone who's a kid lives . Tuna's brother is dead, and so is his dad, who got his head cut off after being burned with a redhot waffle iron... (i know, right? i'm not making this up, so you should just see it for yourself). his dad is David Kessler, too, who seems to have bad luck with living, despite being a werewolf. at the end, the friends get together, and Tuna isn't fake-fat anymore. the way they point that out in the movie really makes me think that Tuna was actually never fat, but was going through a phase that everyone simply accepted and waiting for him to outgrow. the final scene is of Small Paul in a dark room in an asylum, then he looks at the camera, leaving an opening for a futuristic Ice Cream Man sequel we'll probably never see.
go see it.