Entertainment
The Extreme, R-Rated Slasher That Messed Up By Trying To Be A Kid's Movie
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Early 90s slashers are so unhinged that I can’t help but love them. My personal favorite is 1992’s Dr. Giggles because of how committed Larry Drake was to the titular role. Every pre-kill exchange is a cheeky one-liner with some kind of surgical wordplay baked in. It’s the kind of slasher designed to be ridiculous, and you’re not supposed to take it seriously in any capacity. You show up for the body count, the humor, the clever kills, and hope you don’t end up too braindead by the time the credits roll.
1995’s Ice Cream Man follows very similar beats to Dr. Giggles, but makes one fatal mistake: it plays like a young adult movie despite its R rating. Here, we have a killer ice cream man portrayed by Clint Howard, and he carries himself a lot like Dr. Giggles. He’s not all there mentally, he has strange flashbacks tied to the troubled past that led to his present-day rampage, and he does it all while driving around in his ice cream truck abducting children.
The problem is that Dr. Giggles plays like a teen scream that adults can also enjoy. Every protagonist in Ice Cream Man is a child, which means you’re expected to root for them like you would in a kids movie. See the problem? It’s fun watching irresponsible teenagers mess with dark forces and pay the consequences. But when it’s only kids who don’t know better, the humor doesn’t land the same way.
It Starts With A Dog Murder And Gets Worse
Ice Cream Man wastes no time setting up its conflict. We’re introduced to Gregory Tudor (Clint Howard), the local ice cream man. Before handing out treats to neighborhood kids, he was institutionalized at the Wishing Well Sanatorium, where he was subjected to cruel medical experiments. These are vaguely explained at best, but from what I could gather, he had green goo injected into his brain and was fed ice cream to keep him compliant.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the first murder in Ice Cream Man: his landlord’s dog. He really goes for it here, and it immediately sets the tone. Gregory drives around, and if he has no qualms about killing a dog, then kids should be just as easy. Or so he thinks.
When Gregory abducts Roger (Zachary Benjamin) and Small Paul (Mikey LeBeau), it’s up to Johnny Spodak (Justin Isfeld), Heather Langley (Anndi McAfee), and Tuna Cassera (JoJo Adams), who already suspect their creepy ice cream man is behind the disappearances, to put a stop to him.
Outside of Ice Cream Man’s basic plot, there are a couple things you should know. Gregory makes his own ice cream using body parts from his victims, and his truck doubles as a rolling torture chamber. This is a movie that, as far as I can tell, was meant to appeal to kids.
Is It A Kid’s Movie?
The real trouble I have is figuring out who Ice Cream Man is for. I grew up watching stuff like this all the time, so I’m not generally offended by kids sneaking ridiculous slashers behind their parents’ backs. That’s not the issue. I just don’t understand how this movie was ever supposed to reach its intended audience. It’s rated R and packed with over-the-top gore. It’s perfect for sneaking a watch, but no parent in their right mind is seeking this out for their kids.
What’s even more perplexing is that all the young adult beats are there. The adults are incompetent, and it’s up to the kids to take matters into their own hands. You’re supposed to root for them, but they have no charisma and just go through the motions. They even hop on their bikes to do their sleuthing, and I found myself chuckling while humming the Stranger Things theme every time.
I’m not sure if this was intentional or just a byproduct of the premise and production, but most of Ice Cream Man’s humor comes from how emotionally detached everyone feels. They’re just flatly reading their lines. If that was deliberate, it works. I laughed at the rising body count while the cops casually buy ice cream from the guy they’re pretty sure is responsible for the murders.
Even Gregory, running around with heads on a stick, delivers his lines like he’s reading off a cue card. The whole experience is surreal, and definitely something I’d throw on again around Halloween for the fun of it. When my kids are old enough for slashers, I’ll make them endure it, but only as a primer for the far superior Dr. Giggles.
Ice Cream Man is currently streaming for free on Tubi.
Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
Entertainment
I tested the top MacBook alternatives: See which Windows PCs actually beat Apple
The 2026 Dell XPS 14 is a stylish investment for aesthetic-forward power users — I’m thinking content creators who might also be occasional gamers. You’re probably wishing the 14-inch MacBook Pro was even sleeker and a little more portable, and you may be getting impatient waiting for Apple’s touchscreen OLED upgrade. You’re definitely open to carrying around dongles.
I tested two configurations of the handsome XPS 14. The one I recommend as the best MacBook Pro alternative is an upper mid-tier model with an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor and a dazzling tandem OLED touchscreen (an optional upgrade). It’s no battery life champ, but it keeps pace with the base Pro in multi-core workloads, and its integrated GPU is excellent for demanding creative software and casual gaming.
The XPS 14 is easily one of the most elegant laptops I’ve ever encountered. Dell trimmed down its all-aluminum design for 2026, making it a touch thinner and nearly half a pound lighter than a 14-inch Pro. It’s available in two MacBook-y finishes: graphite and shimmer (coming later this year). Its lattice keyboard takes some adjusting to if you’re used to regular island-style keyboards, but it translates to a modern, minimalist look. Its seamless glass haptic touchpad looks equally clean. Its speakers are above-average for a Windows laptop — they’re just a little more echoey than a MacBook’s.
The XPS 14’s 2.8K OLED display is a $150 upcharge that I can endorse. It’s not as bright or crisp as a MacBook Pro’s Liquid Retina XDR display, but it’s more vibrant and just as smooth. (The standard IPS version is much duller in comparison.) Keep in mind that OLED won’t be a thing on a Mac until late 2026 at the soonest.
The Core Ultra X7 chip is a close rival of Apple’s M5 chip when you work it hard. It doesn’t feel as snappy in single-core scenarios, but trails the current MacBook Pro by only four percent when used for multi-core tasks. (That’s nothing.) What’s more, the Core Ultra X7’s Intel Arc B390 iGPU is comparable to an entry-level discrete graphics card. It’s perfectly capable of running graphically taxing titles like Cyberpunk 2077 with the help of games’ AI upscaling tech.
The XPS 14’s stamina is lacking compared to the M5 MacBook Pro, though it really depends on what you’re using it for. It held out for 10 hours and 19 minutes in our video rundown test, which is a full workday at least, but not great. (Its Apple counterpart ran for over 21 hours in the same test.) That said, its 120Hz OLED display dips down to just 20Hz when you’re viewing static content, so it should last much longer when it’s not looping a video.
If you want an XPS 14 with MacBook-beating battery life in almost any scenario, look into the $1,999.99 base model with a Core Ultra 5 325 chip. It lasted 22 hours on the dot in our video rundown test, and its refresh rate can drop to a mere 1Hz for static content. Just know that you’ll sacrifice a good chunk of power: It offers 35 percent worse multi-core performance than the Core Ultra X7 version. Speed-wise, it’s most akin to an M2 MacBook Air from 2022. (The cheaper Dell 14S with the Core Ultra 7 355 chip performs slightly better and lasts even longer, FWIW.)
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