31 Years Later, One of the Most Disturbing Thrillers Ever Made Is Officially Free on Streaming

Released in 1995, Ice Cream Man is the type of so-bad-it’s-good horror movie that rarely gets made in the post-Get Out era where the genre is taken much more seriously. Directed by pornographer Paul Norman, who hoped this was his pivot to kid-friendly horror flicks, Ice Cream Man is a movie where a deranged killer mixes up bugs, human remains, and ice cream and feeds it to children. It’s also a movie that spends a remarkable amount of time showing us what shoes everyone is wearing, as per a sponsorship agreement with Converse that probably cost some poor sneaker executive his job. Norman may have wanted to escape X-rated film, but he wound up making one of the creepiest stories ever put on film.

In other words, unlike the Eli Roth movie, the original Ice Cream Man is a B-movie horror masterpiece, and if you’re looking for an absurd scary movie to get into the Halloween spirit, you truly can’t do better than this.

Ice Cream Man stars Clint Howard (Ron Howard’s younger brother) as Gregory Tudor, a severely troubled man who witnessed the murder of another ice cream truck driver when he was a child. Gregory winds up in a psychiatric institution where he receives treatment that verges on abuse. When he’s finally released as an adult, he does the only logical thing: buy his own ice cream truck and start murdering people.

Howard later said he was inspired by a real-life ice cream man from his childhood who used to scream at kids while driving his truck. However, it’s the actor’s unparalleled ability to maintain a specific type of unhinged energy for long stretches of time that makes Gregory a particularly off-putting antagonist, even before he starts chopping off heads.

In early scenes, Gregory mostly just drives around selling ice cream to kids. The audience soon learns he’s been mixing various gross things into his ice cream, including his murder victims. Local kids start disappearing (we get some hilariously awkward scenes of Howard chasing down various terrified children) and the ones who are left struggle to convince any adult to care.

Eventually, the cops realize something is amiss. A detective played by Jan-Michael Vincent (yes, the guy from that Rick and Morty episode) visits the psychiatric institution where the ice cream man grew up, which leads to one of the film’s most unnerving sequences of the police navigating a decrepit building full of listless psychiatric patients and doctors. It’s an excruciatingly long scene that bounces from scary to funny to scary again as Vincent pushes his way through a seemingly endless crowd of zombie-like moaning people with outstretched arms.

After that, the story ends with a final showdown in Gregory’s blood-soaked ice cream factory where one of his abductees, “Small Paul,” tricks the killer into walking into a giant stand mixer where he is subsequently dismembered. One final scene hints that the ice cream-related trauma that fueled Gregory’s rampage may have been passed on to Small Paul. Sadly, we never got a Small Paul sequel. (More on that in a minute.)

While the plot of Ice Cream Man is nonsensical, the story of how this movie came into existence is even stranger.

It all started with Paul Norman, who under the pseudonym “Norman Apstein” directed such films as Intercourse with the Vampire, Edward Penishands, and The Erotic Adventures of the Three Musketeers. Norman decided to make a scary movie for kids, so he hired some writers (including Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin) to spit out a draft for what was initially more of a horror spoof. Norman cast known actors like Howard and Vincent to give Ice Cream Man a veneer of legitimacy, but a $2 million budget (including that Converse deal) kept it firmly in B-movie territory.

Some scenes were actually filmed in Norman’s house, and he cast himself, his wife, and his son in bit parts. The production also substituted mashed potatoes (with lots of food coloring) for ice cream in many scenes to keep the frozen dessert from melting in between takes. One child actor has a literal pillow stuffed under his shirt the entire time because the script says he’s fat but Norman cast a skinny kid instead. Vincent was also apparently drunk for most of the shoot. (Amazingly, this is all revealed in the DVD/Blu-ray commentary.)

Image: All Channel Films/Everett Collection

Ice Cream Man debuted in Chicago at the 1995 Clint Howard Film Festival, which as far as I can tell was a one-time-only event where three films featuring Howard were screened. It didn’t make much of an impact at the time — three decades later, there still aren’t enough reviews out there to even merit a Rotten Tomatoes score — but Ice Cream Man became a cult classic thanks to the magic of physical media and horror sickos everywhere.

There has also been some talk of a sequel in recent years. In 2014, Howard helped back a Kickstarter campaign for a new movie, which set out to raise $300,000 and fell extremely short of those goals, collecting just $4,000. The actor announced in 2025 that work had begun on a sequel, in which he’d play a new ice cream man, and promised the film would explain some of the original’s weirder plot elements — like why Gregory was obsessed with mixing human body parts into his ice cream.

Whether that sequel ever materializes remains to be seen, although after the damage Eli Roth did this year to the Ice Cream Man brand, we need the return of Howard’s oddball serial killer now more than ever. But either way, nobody can take away the unbridled chaotic beauty of the original film.

Ice Cream Man is streaming for free on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Roku.