Masters of Horror: We All Scream for Ice Cream (2007)

Plot

Buster is an ice cream man with learning disabilities who loves nothing more than to entertain the kids he serves on his round with magic tricks. But for one group of kids, he’s a complete joke and a prank they play on him backfires spectacularly, inadvertently leading to his death. Thirty years later, Buster returns as a vengeful spirit to get vengeance on the now-adults who caused the accident.

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The Masters of Horror TV series was a great idea in theory – get together some of the greatest names in horror, give them an hour-long episode and let them work their big screen magic for the small screen. With names like John Carpenter, John Landis, Mick Garris, Joe Dante, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon and Dario Argento, the series debuted to excellent reviews and lasted for two series before its contract wasn’t renewed. Garris, the creator, then secured another studio to make a similar series, Fear Itself, which only lasted for one season and had many of the same names involved. Like all great anthology films and TV shows, you’re going to get a mixed bag. Some episodes are good, some are not so good. Some people will prefer Dante’s work over Argento’s. Some will like the gorier episodes better than the spookier ones.

A cross between A Nightmare on Elm Street and IT, We All Scream for Ice Cream is an effective, if routine, episode of the series which does exactly what it sets out to do. You’ve seen it before and director Tom Holland, of Child’s Play and Fright Night fame, plays it safe with the material. Exploiting the creepiness of clowns always seems like a cheap way to generate some heat, especially given that Buster didn’t have to be dressed as a clown, he could just have been a normal ice cream man. The narrative is fairly straightforward, with surviving members of the gang being bumped off one-by-one as the story moves along, and Holland keeps things ticking over at a nice pace. He holds back plenty of the little details, revealing bits and pieces about what is happening and why – it’s no secret that it is Buster, back from the dead, doing the killing and so the story plays upon that as much as possible.

Holland was capable of making something childlike to be scary in the shape of Chucky, the killer doll, and he does his best here to make Buster to be as frightening as possible. He’s not going to win the awards for the scariest cinematic clown, but he comes fairly close. Buster’s appearances are telegraphed with the haunting ‘We All Scream For Ice Cream’ song, vaguely reminiscent of the little girls singing ‘One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…’ in A Nightmare on Elm Street and with some eerie shots of his ice cream van moving in slow motion, surrounded by mist. The idea of him targeting the children of his tormentors in order to extract revenge has been done before but here the novelty is that the kids are given ice creams by Buster and, upon eating, their fathers are subjected to a hideous voodoo-doll like death.

William Forsythe is excellent as Buster, alternating between the good-natured pre-prank ice cream man and the evil, vengeful ghost. He’s good at delivering the ‘tug on the heart strings and feel sorry for him’ vibe whilst he’s goofing around with the kids in the flashbacks but just as good being the psychotic, snarling almost zombie-like killer in the present. The make-up changes to give him a scarier, more rotting look for the present day are really effective in expressing this bitter and twisted persona. Lee Tergesen, more famous for playing one of Wayne and Garth’s airhead friends in Wayne’s World, does a decent job in the leading role as the one tasked with stopping Buster. The scenes they share in the finale are good, but it’s all rushed and resolved far too quickly, as Tergesen’s character goes into Kevin McAllister Home Alone mode to prepare traps for Buster and defeat him once and for all.

We All Scream for Ice Cream’s trump card is definitely the practical effects on show. When characters die, they are reduced to puddles of melted ice cream. The first couple of instances happen off-screen but once the episode stops pulling it’s punches and starts going for the jugular, you get to see the melting in all of its glory. The episode’s show-stopping moment involves a man melting in a hot tub. It’s such a great display of prosthetics, goo and slime that it’s almost a travesty to see cheap CGI used in a similar sequence in the finale. It’s like they emptied the budget in the hot tub scene rather than saving it for the big finish.

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Final Verdict

We All Scream for Ice Cream might have worked better as a full-blown low budget B-movie but it’s still an entertaining episode of the series. It falls into cliché and familiar territory, but Holland handles it with assured competence and the decent production values keep things ticking over nicely. Just like an ice cream itself, you’ll enjoy it whilst it lasts but it leaves no lasting legacy.

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We All Scream for Ice Cream Director(s): Tom Holland Writer(s): Mick Garris, David J. Schow (teleplay), John Farris (short story "I Scream. You Scream. We All Scream for Ice Cream") Actor(s): William Forsythe, Lee Tergesen, Brent Sheppard, Maxwell Neck, Tim Henry Duration: 57 mins