I’ll be honest, when I first saw the trailer for this film, I thought it was a parody. Lo and behold, there’s sadly not much to laugh about in Roth’s latest feature, the first release from his company The Horror Section. It’s Eli Roth’s Weapons, ladies and gentlemen, something no one ever wanted nor asked for. This splatter horror has to be one of the low points of 2026 so far, featuring an ice cream man using his product to poison children, turning them into an army of demonic killers.

Ari Millen stars as the titular dessert scooper, in a silent, Pied Piper-esque role, whose background we learn is similar to that of Freddy Krueger. Millen is good, although given little more to do than unnerving smiles, and is a caricature villain, aesthetically akin to Sportacus. The children who eat the ice cream are activated at night (à la Weapons), and immediately begin brutally murdering their parents with a myriad of household items, and the following day commit similar atrocities to adults across the entire town. The film’s protagonist is Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), a pre-teen misfit who doesn’t eat ice cream due to his lactose intolerance.

He joins forces with Mia (Kiori Mirza Waldman), who ate the ice cream but subsequently threw it up, and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly), whom they don’t bother to give an excuse to, and the team are later joined by Jared’s older sister, Lizzie (Sarah Abbott). The film also features Roth himself as Marty, Jared and Lizzie’s father.

If the film had been self-aware, there’s a world in which it works as a fun, campy romp. Unfortunately, Roth never achieves a consistent tone, and the result is a film that is messy and underdeveloped. Whilst I hate to admit it, a couple of the jokes during the family dinner scene did get a chuckle out of me (maybe the only person who gets Eli Roth’s humour is Eli Roth); in general, the comedy is dated, unfunny and inappropriate (eg. a 12-year-old girl makes a bulimia joke). Consequently, I think audiences will spend much of the runtime laughing at Roth, rather than with him. Zeltzer and Abbott are standouts; Abbott in particular has a great scene reminiscent of DiCaprio’s intoxicated journey to his car in The Wolf of Wall Street.

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The entire film feels as though Roth thought of a one-line synopsis and never took it any further. He planted a seed and immediately dug it up, then asked ChatGPT to tell him what the tree would have looked like. The main set piece features the children violently murdering their teachers, and it feels as though the rest of the film was built around that premise. This portion of the film does have some very creative gore as the children manipulate school supplies to fit their needs, but sadly this becomes a gimmick all too fast, and the rest of the film’s violence is tired and repetitive (how many times do we need to see children playing with guts?).

Even more evil than this is the egregious use of AI, which Roth has been receiving mountainous criticism for after he “misspoke”, originally claiming AI had not been used in the film.

It is unclear who Roth’s target audience is here, aside from diehard gore fans. He has repeatedly emphasised that they are releasing the film unrated, meaning children can watch it. This is bizarre – does Roth genuinely want children watching a film where a teacher’s brain is scooped out and fed to him? And if for whatever strange reason he does, why include references to Glengarry Glen Ross? In an interview with IndieWire, Roth said that if he were 10, he would think this was the greatest movie ever made. I’m not sure that’s quite the flex he thinks it is, but even so, I firmly believe even 10-year-olds have better taste than this.

The film feels incredibly rushed, wasting no time developing the plot or building tension; the first scene has the children eating the poisoned ice cream. This was shot in nineteen days, and you can tell. Even the post-production feels slapdash; there were moments where audio wasn’t correctly synced, and in one scene you could see exactly when the kids were told: “Start running!”

This is clearly an abysmal misfire. Any moments of interest melt away quicker than ice cream on a hot day, and all we’re left with is a mess and an empty cone. I’ll be avoiding dairy for the foreseeable future.

★

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In UK Cinemas now / Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O’Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman, Sarah Abbott, Benjamin Byron Davis / Dir: Eli Roth / StudioCanal UK / 18