Recent Reviews
TV Review: Masters of Horror - We All Scream for Ice Cream
By James VanFleet

Jan 21, 2007, 21:05

We All Scream for Ice Cream is damn fun.  I was never scared, not even briefly, even with an undead clown in tow, but that’s okay, I guess.  Because We All Scream is fun.  Tom Holland, the director of this episode, is the man behind two 80’s horror classics: Fright Night and Child’s Play.  His work here has the same attitude, the horror movie equivalent of someone hiding a grin with a grimace.  An inspired tone.  But is that enough?

The story revolves around a group of adults, with a friendship borne out of prepubescence.   Their happiness is threatened by a ghostly clown, who they all knew before, as children.  Will they band together and subdue the threat?  If this sounds vaguely familiar, that is because it is.  The original short story, by John Farris, released in 1990, a few years after a certain other horror author released a certain book about a certain terrifying clown.

Lee Tergesen plays the thanklessly bland role of Layne, a man who played a significant role in the sad demise of innocent, stuttering ice-cream clown Buster (William Forsythe).  The clown currently has revenge on his undead mind, and he sets about it by going after the children of Layne and his friends.

Well, they aren’t all his friends.  One of the possible victims is Virgil, a creepy reprobate played disturbingly well by Colin Cunningham.  He was also there on the fateful day of Buster’s death, but he feels great.  As he swims in a hot tub, he announces that, because he has no children, he’s safe.  Which is both true and false.  His exit from the episode is memorably gross.

Buster’s revenge on the children-turned-adults would be stupid, were it not obviously stupid, and therefore damn funny.  It’s ice-cream voodoo, with figurine ice-cream bars substituting for the dolls.  Buster putters his old, ghostly ice cream truck through dry ice, and gives the kids their evil, magical treats.  Each treat is accompanied by a groaner like: “Taste the revenge!” or “Time for dessert!”  Joel Hodgson once explained that puns and kills go together naturally in movies, because the kill softens the blow of the pun.

William Forsythe plays Buster perfectly, no matter the situation.  Both sides of the coin are effective.  His evocation of a simple, likable fellow is evenly matched by his ghostly incarnation, who cackles and leers as he dispenses sweet, sugary justice.  His makeup changes, too, which suggests that clown makeup isn’t scary enough on its own, which is not only incorrect, but insulting to legions of children and adults who have made coulrophobia one of the most common of all fears.

Sadly, the episode never becomes cinematic enough with its style to truly deliver on the clowny threat.  Holland delivers the story well enough, but he doesn’t take it to the next level, where it might be both frightening and hilarious.  Which is understandable, I suppose.  That fusion could easily result in a failure, an episode too wide-ranging to achieve anything beyond curiosity.

But by leaving most of the scary grunt-work to Forsythe, Holland shortchanges the episode’s potential.  So I must list small, individual reasons for why the episode's worth a view.  Honestly, I’m exhausted from using this weird cumulative reasoning.  Where’s the episode that’s going to knock it out of the park?  The one where I’ll be left dumbfounded, struggling to explain how amazing it is?  Fun is all well and good, but, somewhere down the line, we constant viewers deserve an episode that’s horrifying.