When Eli Roth was making “Borderlands,” a $120 million adaptation of a popular video game, he felt the movie getting farther and farther away from his punk rock vision.
“As things grow bigger, studios just naturally become more risk averse,” Roth says. “My nature as a filmmaker is to do the thing that’s left of center, because that’s what has worked for me.”
But to earn a PG-13 rating, studio executives pushed for cuts and tweaks, and the finished product was a disaster, bombing with audiences and critics when it opened in 2024.
“You got something that belonged to nobody,” Roth says. “It’s not a kids’ movie, but it’s trying to appeal to everybody. It’s for gamers, but it doesn’t have the violence the gamers want because it can’t be that extreme because it costs too much. You just wind up with a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl.”
That’s not the case with “Ice Cream Man,” which — love it or hate it — is unabashedly Roth’s vision. The director, who made a name for himself directing gorefests like “Hostel” and “The Green Inferno,” is returning to his ultraviolent roots with the story of children who become homicidal maniacs when they devour frozen treats.
