Editorials
The Horror World Needs More Clint Howard and More ‘Ice Cream Man’
In a just and fair world, this year would see the release of a seventh or eighth installment in the Ice Cream Man franchise. Alas, this is a cold and dark world that requires great perseverance and we are left with but one Ice Cream Man movie, a twisted 1995 horror film that sports one of the few Clint Howard lead performances out there.
If you want to know why Howard is a favorite among directors like Rob Zombie (Halloween, 3 From Hell, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto), Uwe Boll (Bloodrayne: The Third Reich, Blubberella), and, of course, his brother Ron (pretty much everything), then you need only check out Ice Cream Man, the rare movie that takes full advantage of Howard’s one-of-a-kind energy.
Ice Cream Man follows Gregory (Howard), a man who spent years in a questionable mental institution after witnessing the murder of his local ice cream man, someone he regarded as a hero. Gregory returns to his hometown as an adult to take over the position of ice cream man…but his interests lie far beyond merely dishing out the flavors of the week.
As kids begin to go missing, the police start looking into Gregory and a group of local children also start to spy on the mysterious man.
Clint Howard has had plenty of scene-stealing moments in bit roles throughout his long career, but Ice Cream Man really gave him a chance to shine. Howard brings both sympathy and downright creepiness to his character, managing to show off sides to himself he hasn’t quite had the room to show in other flicks. The actor has admitted that he was deeply committed to the role of the Ice Cream Man; he told Joe Bob Briggs on an episode of “MonsterVision” in 1999 that he would scream at the top of his lungs on his way to the set every day, which led to his raspy voice in the movie. Clearly, he relished the chance to finally create his own horror icon.
The premise for Ice Cream Man is, of course, ridiculous and that’s something that Howard and the filmmakers smartly embraced. The film is often so over the top at times that it’s clear the filmmakers are going for laughs. “We had our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks,” Howard told Joe Bob Briggs about the film.
In one scene, Howard’s Gregory goes to visit a local woman who has been flirting with him. He shows up with a giant ice cream cone topped with a man’s head. It’s his way of courting her. The scene is so over-the-top that the folks over at RiffTrax recently pondered in a commentary for the movie where Gregory would have gotten such a big ice cream cone for the head. A fair question, but such details hardly matter in a movie that’s having so much fun with itself.
Other hilariously out-there scenes include everything from people stuffed in freezers to gooey body parts being mixed into ice cream.
No matter how one feels about Ice Cream Man and its bizarre way of telling its wild story, Howard’s creation is at least undeniable. The actor deserved a few more goes at this character, and he almost had that chance several years back. Ice Cream Man has built such a cult following over the years that there was almost a sequel put into production in 2014. A Kickstarter campaign was initiated to get funding for a sequel, but their goal was never reached; just $4,000 of a $300,000 goal was raised.
Not everyone may agree, but if you’re asking me Ice Cream Man deserves another chapter. Its unique nature has helped keep it alive over the years and Howard’s performance is one that should have cemented his place next to folks like Tony Todd and Robert Englund. There’s still a chance someone comes out of nowhere and decides to finance a sequel but for now, we have but one movie to appreciate the weird delight that is Clint Howard’s Ice Cream Man.
Considering how wonderfully deranged, uproariously funny, and downright unique that movie is, maybe it is a just and fair world after all.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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