So it’s fascinating to see a new horror movie from a veteran filmmaker get all of this so wrong, when it comes to Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man. On paper, Ice Cream Man had a lot of net positives going for it that could have led to the cultivation of a built-in audience in a similar way to those earlier successes. But Ice Cream Man marked a bold new chapter for the filmmaker; one in which he was taking full authorship of the story at large. Roth founded the media company The Horror Section to produce and distribute small-budget horror films, including his own, and Ice Cream Man is the fruit of that labor. For frame of reference, Ice Cream Man had a budget of $5.5 million, a small but not small-enough figure in the grand scheme of things.