Eli Roth's new horror film, "Un dulce olor a muerte" (A Sweet Smell of Death), has been reviewed by the Spanish newspaper La Razón, which gave it two and a half stars out of five and described it as a slasher awash in equal parts sugar and blood.
The review was written by critic Carmen L. Lobo, who noted in her byline that she worked for 11 years at the newspaper ABC and has been at La Razón since its founding.
According to the review, the story follows an idyllic summer in a small town where a sinister ice cream vendor, who appears to have stepped out of the last century, starts handing out ice creams to the local children. The names of the treats are unsettling, the review said, but the worst is still to come.
Children turn into killers at night
Lobo wrote that at night, when the vendor's van drives through the town's streets playing an eerie tune, the children who have eaten the ice cream transform into violent creatures with a terrifying nastiness and a desire to kill the adults around them in the most brutal, and at times entertaining, ways imaginable.
The review described multiple decapitations and body parts scattered across schools, squares and gardens, along with gore that it called crude and explicit, the kind genre fans would relish.
Lobo added, half joking, that parents might want to keep their children from eating too many ice lollies this summer, and not just because of the calories.
Cast, crew and running time
The film is directed by Eli Roth from a screenplay credited to Noah Nelson, Eli Roth and Noah Belson. Its cast includes Ari Millen, Charlie Zeltzer, Shiloh O'Reilly, Kiori Mirza Waldman and Sarah Abbot. The US production runs 86 minutes and is classified as horror.
Roth is known for directing gore-heavy horror films including "Cabin Fever," "Hostel" and "The Green Inferno" (El infierno verde). La Razón's review said the director shows no sign of tiring of orgies of viscera, blood and exposed internal organs in his latest work.
Comparisons to other horror classics
The review noted that the film draws on influences including "Who Can Kill a Child?," the "A Nightmare on Elm Street" saga and the "Terrifier" franchise, though it argued the film does not, in the end, bring anything new to the genre.
La Razón summed up the film's best feature as its outrageous, brutal deaths, which gore fans will savour, while its worst was that the low budget occasionally takes its toll on what the review called such a rowdy, unruly story.
More from La Razón
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