Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like Ice Cream Man:
Five Nights at Freddy’s
The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie adaptation succumbs to the pitfalls of a poorly executed narrative, sidelining its potentially terrifying animatronic characters in favor of a tepid and uninspiring trauma story. Josh Hutcherson gives a commendable performance, but there’s not enough support around him to make this movie work.
Weapons
Weapons opens with one of the most chilling hooks you’ll hear in any movie this year: at exactly 2:17 a.m., every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, walked downstairs, opened the front door, stepped into the dark… and never came back. It’s the kind of premise that immediately grabs you, the kind of logline that sells itself in a trailer and sticks in your head for days. Writer-director Zach Cregger, who burst onto the horror scene with 2022’s Barbarian, proves once again that he knows how to start a story with an irresistible, terrifying question.
Evil Dead Rise
There aren’t many horror franchises able to reinvent themselves as often as Evil Dead does while still maintaining relevancy and quality. Maybe it’s because Sam Raimi holds his creation so close to his heart that only a select few are able to take on the premise, or maybe it’s because the premise seems simple and malleable enough to make nearly anything work. It can shoot for the downright zany and ludicrous with Evil Dead II or Army of Darkness, or it can strive to be like Lee Cronin’s newest spin Evil Dead Rise – a movie so sick and twisted that you can’t help but give it its dues by the time the credits roll.
Thanksgiving
Eli Roth, a significant figure in gnarly genre filmmaking, takes a stab at the holiday horror subgenre with Thanksgiving, a movie that successfully balances gore, satire, and a twisted sense of humor. Roth, known for his unapologetically brutal style, delivers a horror-thriller that not only embraces the conventions of the genre but also winks at them, creating an entertaining if not entirely groundbreaking Thanksgiving slasher.
Scream 6
Despite a nearly complete turnover of legacy characters, the Scream franchise keeps on rolling – and it may be as good as any since the original hit theaters in 1996. Scream 6 gets bolder and better, and the movie builds on the best aspects of Radio Silence’s last installment of the franchise.
Obsession
Curry Barker – YouTube creator turned filmmaker – has emphasized that Obsession is partly inspired by a Simpsons episode where Bart gets his hands on a monkey’s paw. Which tracks, because the film is about exactly that and essentially just that: what happens when you get one wish and that wish goes so, so horribly wrong. It’s contained at such a small, intimate scale, like a messed up Twilight Zone episode that escalates in tension and stays committed to its absurdity without overbaking any of its characters or themes.
V/H/S/Halloween
V/H/S/Halloween feels like the most obvious swing this long-running Shudder anthology could take, and the holiday framing mostly works. After a few detours to specific years and even outer space, this film plants every vignette on October 31, stitching them together with a proper wraparound about The Octagon Corporation’s cursed “Diet Phantasma” soda that kills its taste testers in escalatingly nasty ways. Bryan M. Ferguson leans into splattery punch lines here, and the carnage sets the tone for a lineup that ricochets between gross-out mayhem and quieter, queasier terror.
Borderlands
Maybe this was a doomed project from the start. Video game adaptations are notoriously difficult to pull off, and the idea of a Borderlands movie led by Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart always felt like an odd fit. Their acting styles, combined with Eli Roth’s directorial approach, were never going to align into something cohesive. The result is exactly what I feared—a loud, obnoxious, and utterly forgettable misfire that does little justice to its source material.
In a Violent Nature
In a Violent Nature didn’t blow me away, but it’s creative enough to have me intrigued with where Chris Nash will set his sights next. The movie is made specifically for the hardcore sickos out there that love to see how far a creative can go to make an audience feel queasy.
Heart Eyes
Heart Eyes delivers a clever and blood-soaked twist on the slasher genre, taking a cue from classics like Scream while putting a Valentine’s Day spin on the formula. Directed with a knowing wink and just enough bite, this seasonal horror-thriller finds a solid rhythm early on—thanks in large part to its lead duo—and mostly rides that momentum until the final act falters under the weight of an undercooked reveal.
READ MORE: Movies Like Thanksgiving, Movies Like Obsession
