The Weird Making of Ice Cream Man

Ice Cream Man (1995) should have been forgotten. Its director worked mostly in porn. Its co-writer was a kid who would later make Wedding Crashers. Its star prepped by screaming at nobody on the drive to set every morning. Thirty years in, the thing has a cult.

The budget quadrupled, the target audience never got to see it, and the director said so on the record. A sequel has been trying to get made for a decade. Here is how a direct-to-video disaster kept its grip.

A children's horror film, made by the wrong people

Paul Norman is credited on Ice Cream Man as "Norman Apstein." That is his mainstream pseudonym. His actual career was adult film, and this was his only shot at anything else. The pitch was a horror movie for kids, The Goonies meets Monster Squad meets It. Sven Davison and David Dobkin were hired to write the screenplay, and Dobkin drafted it in three days. A decade later he would direct Wedding Crashers. This was his first feature.

Clint Howard drove and screamed

Clint Howard took the lead role of Gregory Tudor, a deranged former psychiatric patient who reopens a shuttered ice cream factory and reprocesses the rude children of the neighborhood into flavor of the day. To hit the voice he wanted, Howard screamed at the top of his lungs during his daily commute to set. That raspy gravelly tone on screen is real damage.

The money problem

The film was budgeted at about $2 million. Overtime ran actual costs to roughly four times that. Producer David Goldstein later called the film a "total disaster" driven by financial miscalculation. Norman himself blamed the kid-friendly angle: "[I] made a movie for preteens that no mother of preteens would allow them to see." It disappeared on release.

Joe Bob brought it back

Joe Bob Briggs hosted Ice Cream Man on TNT's MonsterVision in the late 1990s, with Clint Howard stopping by to talk about the movie on air. That single segment is most of the reason anyone remembers it now. Vinegar Syndrome issued an uncut Blu-ray in 2017 with the MonsterVision host segments included as bonus content, and the reissue circuit has kept the film alive ever since.

The sequel that won't die

A 2014 Kickstarter for Ice Cream Man 2: Sundae Bloody Sundae aimed at $300,000 and pulled in about $4,000. The project did not die. Clint Howard confirmed in 2023 that he had written a fresh script with the original director and was pushing to get it into production. Thirty years in, the man will not stop making ice cream.

Horror

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