Eli

The kid in the candy shop is Eli Roth with a gore budget and in the “Hostel” director’s latest bloody romp, “Ice Cream Man,” there’s a decidedly childlike giddiness from behind the camera to accompany the sicko suburban carnage depicted onscreen. Where others might view a “Village of the Damned” scenario as dread-inducing, Roth hears the bell for recess.

That doesn’t necessarily translate to a successful film. Little things like style, narrative command and character still matter, and Roth, who wrote “Ice Cream Man” with Noah Belson and even gives himself a role, is decidedly more of a smart-ass vaudevillian than a skilled filmmaker. (“Thanksgiving” was better as an impish sideshow teased as a trailer in “Grindhouse” than as a standalone feature years later.) And while that same belief in the lasting entertainment value of jokey splat-itude gives “Ice Cream Man” its occasional well-churned moments, it eventually undercuts Roth’s own semi-worthy bid to rattle us as the best horror movies can.

With its sunny elevator-music-scored opening of cheery park scenes and leafy residential neighborhoods, “Ice Cream Man” sets itself up, not unappealingly, like a Norman Rockwell painting asking to be vandalized. Next comes the arrival of a tinkling blue ice cream truck manned by an eerily silent, smiling, wraith-like purveyor (Ari Millen) with a John Waters mustache. He hands out his goodies free of charge, and the town’s children converge excitedly, then head home with colorfully smeared faces and a peculiarly quiet demeanor — except for easily bullied Jared (Charlie Zeltzer), who’s lactose intolerant and nobody’s friend anyway, after losing the ballgame for his team.

But when his ice cream-eating schoolmates begin slaughtering their parents overnight, seemingly fueled by the wafting sound of the truck jingle and old-timey black-and-white animations invading their phones, Jared seems like the lucky one. At school the next day, the cold-eyed stares of dairy-slopped grade-schoolers befuddles the teachers (“Is this some sort of zombie pajama day challenge?” is one of the better reaction lines) as well as unsuspecting Jared, along with two other unaltered classmates, Mia (Kiori Waldman) and Tommy (Shiloh O’Reilly). Then the ice cream man returns to refuel his targeted customers, who try to convert our well-cast, engaging trio of young double-scoop holdouts. Things get sticky.

A daytime massacre, built around gleefully homicidal children in full kill mode against adults, contains visuals designed to forever alter how you see tetherball, rope-skipping and cat’s cradle (plus a quasi-amusing shout-out to “The Birds”). It’s clear Roth was aiming for a blood-and-guts tour de force, which this both is and isn’t. Even after Jared and the gang escape the slayground to a church where they get the ice cream man’s backstory from a cowardly priest (Benjamin Byron Davis), genuine scares aren’t really in play here, just taboo snickers.

Then again, the carefully calibrated blend of dark humor, weirdness and sheer terror that made last year’s “Weapons” a rapturous nightmare about creepy children isn’t what Roth is after (or cares to do). He’s got a super-soaker “Goonies”-meets-early-Peter Jackson mindset and a list of clever kills to execute. Time’s a wastin’.

So a pinch of surprising depth proves to be the most unwieldy move when Roth unveils a resonantly nasty surprise for his story’s endgame. The impact is muted because it instantly clarifies how needlessly trivial everything before it was. Maybe someday, Roth will temper his empty-calories instincts and make more of a meal out of his twisted ideas.

May 21 (UPI) — Eli Lilly said its weight loss drug, retatrutide, helped nearly half of participants in a phase 3 trial to lose more than 30% of their weight.

Many of the people who lost that much weight were on the highest dose of retatrutide for up to two years, but the company said that the weekly injection was effective for weight loss across all doses of the drug.

Retatrutide affects three hormones — GLP-1 and GIP, each of which are targeted by similar weight loss drugs, and glucagon, which none of them targets — and could be best for people looking to lose larger amounts of weight, said the company’s chief scientific and product officer, Dan Skovronsky.

“We haven’t seen that level of weight loss before with these kinds of medicines,” Skovronsky said, referring to a group of drugs that includes Eli Lilly’s Zepbound.

“For some patients, 30% weight loss may be more than what they’re seeking,” he said. “For other patients, that may be what they need to get healthy. So, not everyone will go up to the highest dose level and stay on it for two years.”

The phase 3 trial included 2,339 people who were obese or overweight. They were evaluated after 1 1/2 years or two years having injections.

Those who received the highest dose lost an average of 70 pounds, roughly 28% of their body weight, after 1 1/2 years, with patients who were assessed after two years losing an average of 85 pounds, or 30.3% of their weight, the company reported.

Side effects from the drug were reported to be similar to other weight loss drugs, which include nausea, diarrhea and constipation, and some patients also experienced upper respiratory tract infections and a nerve condition called dysesthesia, the company said.

The side effects were also similar to those seen in phase 3 trials evaluating retatrutide for use against diabetes and a specific type of arthritis.

Eli Lilly has not yet applied to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of the drug for any of the three uses.