by: Dr. Boogie
The Masters of Horror series is kind of hit or miss. We All Scream for Ice Cream is a tick in the "miss" category, thanks to a meandering script and some crummy acting. If you're looking for a scary movie about an ice cream man, you'll be better off checking out Ice Cream Man, starring the one and only Clint Howard.
In spite of that, though, there is a really nice death scene that almost makes up for the mediocre... everything else:
Layne is having a bit of a midlife crisis, in that his friends are disappearing and leaving behind only the clothes they were wearing at the time. As he struggles to figure out why something like this is happening to them (or anyone, for that matter), he realizes that he and the victims share a common thread: they were all involved in the death of an ice cream truck driver when they were just kids.
During the most recent disappearances, one of Layne's remaining friends calls to let him know that there was one other person on the scene who didn't leave his clothes behind: bully-turned-white trash layabout, Virgil Constance.
Layne goes to confront Virgil at the junk yard where he apparently lives. That he has a giant wooden tub in the middle of his living room goes unnoted as Layne grills him for information on the disappearances. Question #1 has got to be why everyone in the town assumes that a pile of clothes means a person is dead. Virgil turns out to be a veritable font of information: he has determined that the killer is none other than Buster, the clown that they (mainly Virgil) accidentally killed as kids, and that he is getting his revenge by tricking children into eating man-shaped ice cream bars that cause their victims to melt!
Of course! It was all so obvious! What's more: Virgil is convinced that he's safe because he doesn't have kids of his own to eat the ice cream. Turns out he was right about everything, except that last part.
Elsewhere, Buster hands over one of his vanilla man-cicles to a random child. And just like that, Virgil has a meltdown:
Someone should have warned him about the dangers of spending too much time in a hot tub!
Sure, Virgil spent all of his five minutes of screen time being an incredibly unlikeable douche, but on the other hand, no one in the movie would have any idea why any of this was happening if not for him somehow managing to piece together the entire mystery. This shabby redneck was right about everything, except that apparently any kid can eat your cursed voodoo ice cream and kill you. Unless we're meant to assume that the girl in the cutaway was his illegitimate daughter...
But seriously, how pissed are Modern English that they weren't a part of the soundtrack?
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