We All Scream For Ice Cream

Are you scared of clowns? Are you scared of ice cream? Are you scared of retards? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you might be interested in We All Scream For Ice Cream. Ice Cream is Tom Holland’s (Child’s Play) entry in the Masters of Horror series. It is considered by many to be one of the worst episodes of the bunch. I kind of enjoyed it.

Layne (Lee Tergesen) has recently returned to the town where he grew up, hoping to have a nice, comfortable life. He is a family man; he has a wife, two kids, and a dark, childhood secret. He soon meets up with a couple of his childhood friends and finds out quickly that his move may have been a bad decision. His dark, childhood secret is coming back to haunt him. His friends start disappearing.

When Layne was a kid, he and his friends formed a neighborhood gang. They would go around doing kid stuff, like playing baseball, riding bikes, and eating candy. They probably also did some mischievous things, like farting and blowing shit up (I say probably because the movie doesn’t get into it). One of the kids in the group, Virgil, is a sociopathic little prick (the actor who plays this kid is hilariously over-the-top and annoying). With a name like Virgil, he would have to be an asshole; otherwise he’d be getting beat up all the time. So, Virgil decides to play a prank on the local ice cream man. This is sad because the ice cream man is a mentally challenged guy named Buster (William Forsythe). He dresses up like a clown and drives around town in a Cheery Tyme ice cream truck, delivering frozen treats to the neighborhood kids. He performs magic tricks and proclaims, “It’s Ch..Ch..Ch..Cheery Tyme” (he has a stuttering problem) and all the kids love him, except for Virgil. I think Virgil makes fun of Bu…Bu…Buster because it makes Virgil feel better about himself…you know, that whole putting other people down to improve your self-esteem thing. Virgil concocts a plan, enlists his friends’ help (Layne doesn’t want to play along, but is too much of a pussy to say no to Virgil), and plays a not-so-funny practical joke on Buster.

To make an already short movie plot-line shorter, Buster gets run over by his own ice cream truck and dies. Virgil and his pals run off. The end.

Wait…no…it keeps going. Buster is now a pissed-off, retarded, ice-cream-man-dressed-as-a-clown ghost, avenging his own death. He only drives around at night. Wherever he goes, the temperature drops below freezing and his truck is enshrouded in fog. The kids sleepwalk towards his eerie intonations of, “It’s Ch…Ch…Ch…Cheery Tyme”. He gives the children of the pranksters ice cream treats that look like people. When the kiddies eat the ice cream, their parents die. They melt like an ice cream cone in the hand of a simpleton on a hot summer day.

The best scene in the film involves the adult Layne’s confrontation with the adult Virgil (Colin Cunningham). Virgil is relaxing in a hot tub in an old shack. He comes up from underwater in a manner reminiscent of the famous scene in Apocalypse Now. He’s a greasy bastard with nasty teeth. He tells Layne about how he “corn-holed” one of their friends when they were little. He claims that he is exempt from Buster’s curse because he doesn’t have any kids. It turns out that he does. One of the women he raped had a child. That child eats some human-shaped ice cream. Virgil melts in a gooey mess. Great job, KNB.

This movie was not scary. I think it was supposed to be somewhat serious, but it wasn’t. I enjoyed the effects work and the cheesy story. The acting was pretty bad, but funny in some instances. I don’t suffer from coulrophobia (the fear of clowns), but even if I did, this movie wouldn’t have scared me. The clown in Poltergeist scared me when I was a kid. Buster has nothing on that fucker.