Let me tell you how much I absolutely despise these kinds of movies, movies which promise you a certain style and then completely crap on it in the last few minutes, which this definitely does.

I get it - I get that these low-life directors without sufficient resources, scripts or actors decide that by somehow pasting in a few scenes at the beginning and the end of a movie will magically transform an ugly duckling into a swan. It doesn't.

I didn't think the acting was all that bad - it was passable. The problem was that the directing and the scenes were banal, with the exception of the murders by supposedly the Ice Cream Truck vendor. It dragged. Really dragged. It turns out that almost everything you're watching happened in the imagination of Mary, the wife with children whose husband has been delayed joining her in a move to a new house. A creepy house moving van guy sets her off, and she being a writer struggling to come up with a new story 'naturally' (that's sarcastic, for anyone missing that) imagines almost all of the rest of the movie in her mind, because, of course, that's what movies do, they sell you on a concept and then, hey, it's all not real! Don't you feel stupid for not getting our impossible to get clues?

In reality, Mary is the mother of a couple of children with a loving husband. In the movie when she thinks about the 12 years she's been saddled with children, she longs for her high school days, apparently when she would make love to any bad boy within reach, based on her behavior in this movie with an 17 year old buff teenager going to college who peddles her dope. In Mary's mind, it was fine to smoke dope with and boff that kid in a public park before her husband came home. Good for you, Mary, but hey, it's only her fantasy, so it's hard to fault her on that and I won't.

Mind you, none of the scenes remotely make you think that she's imagining them - they are seemingly completely real - but at the end of the movie you know they're not because 2 of the people supposedly killed by the crazy Ice Cream Truck driver are alive and greet Mary, which is when you know that the director of this garbage is laughing in your face for having spent almost an hour and a half of your life expecting horror and instead experiencing a screw job. And oh yeah, that creepy moving van guy shows up in the background at the movie's end, the director's 'tell' that somehow he's real (having triggered Mary's paranoia and fantasy thinking) and the rest of the movie wasn't real - woo hoo!

So, to recap: no one dies in the movie. There is no Ice Cream Truck. There is no psycho killer driver of the non-existent Ice Cream Truck. None of what you see from the time you hear the Ice Cream Truck's music in the beginning to the almost end of the movie actually happened, except in Mary's head. She's simply trying to work out her next fiction book, because Mary is a writer who got triggered by the creepy moving van driver, don't you see? Aren't you THRILLED by this revelation? Isn' the director BRILLIANT???

It's a classic dream-sequence movie, where you get cheated at the end, trying to figure out what's happening because you, being an actual reasoning human being, figured it was a straight-forward horror movie and didn't realize how brilliant the low-budget director was to make it almost incomprehensible so they could feel 'arty'. It's the worst kind of sloppy and cheating kind of movie you can make, so my assumption is that the director Megan Freels Johnson is a hack. An absolute hack. I will look for her future work and avoid it by all means necessary.

Mary (Deanna Russo) moves into a new neighborhood. She is a writer. There is the creepy moving guy, the creepy guy who sells ice cream, and the hot neighbor stud who comes on to her. We know Mary is the final girl in a series of murders committed with a spring loaded knife, ice cream scoop, and was that mixer even plugged in? Plenty of blood, not much gore.

The characters were okay. This is a me too horror which was more drama about Mary than horror about the ice cream truck, but "What is it about Mary?" has been taken as a title. Not one Clint Howard joke. The small talk was bad. You could do worse. Not bad for an indie. Light on special effects.

Guide: F-word, brief sex, near nudity.

Deanna Russo stars as Mary....a woman who has moved back to her old home town after being gone many years. However, her husband and kids are still back in their old home for a few days....and Deanna is working on getting the new home ready for her family. Surprisingly, the neighborhood ends up being a sort of middle-class Babylon...where all sorts of sins hide beneath the surface. But the really big problem with the neighborhood is that darned ice cream man....he keeps showing up all times of the day or night to dispense sweet treats....and then kill you...even if you left him a nice tip!

I should mention right off that I am not the target audience for The Ice Cream Truck. I am not a fan of slasher pics and my feelings about the film may not be exactly what a fan of the genre might think. However, I also am pretty sure that slasher fans would not exactly love the film but for completely different reasons. The film is in many ways very much unlike a usual hack and splatter movie...which I like. There is a lot of plot for such a picture and the slashing only takes up a small part of the movie-which will no doubt disappoint some but made me happy. Additionally, the ending is quite strange and not exactly what many fans would want...and that part left me rather cold and will probably do the same for many viewers. Now I am not saying it's a bad film. Russo is excellent in the lead and the story kept my interest. The director also kept a nice sense of foreboding throughout the story. And, some folks might enjoy seeing the hunky John Redlinger, who plays a real bad boy...Max. Overall, I see this as a film I'd put in the category of rent it versus spending the time and money to see it in the theaters.