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Hot Blood Sundae (2008) Directed by John Darbonne. Starring Bobbi Billard, Gelusa Zaripova and Shastina Eloff. A masked killer with an interest in turning women into new soft serve flavors targets the bikini clad employees of an Adults Only ice cream store.

We open with blonde bimbo Girlfriend having a few glasses of wine, and then eating an ice cream cone. (The character is literally listed as “Girlfriend” in the credits.) It’s a dark night and she’s home alone, which can mean only one thing: time for a post ice cream shower! Naturally, she’s being stalked by a costumed madman.

After breaking into her place, he sees a kitchen knife on the counter and ignores it in favor of the half-eaten cone. I want to believe that this first person POV weapons choosing scene is a reference to the beginning of Halloween, in which young Michael Myers selects a knife from the kitchen drawer. But probably not.

Catching on that something isn’t right, our doomed lass exits the shower with bone dry hair and not a drop of moisture on her tanned skin.

Was the shower water metaphorical? Did we imagine the spray? It’s unclear.

Girlfriend does a swift walk through of the joint while calling out the name “Jack” repeatedly, as if her boyfriend Jack will only appear if his name is repeated five times. There’s no response, so it’s back to the meta-shower.

Here’s where it starts to get weird: while directly under the shower head, our girl tosses her hair and closes her eyes, but the falling water has no actual dampening effect on her hair or skin! What sorcery is this?! Either Girlfriend is a hologram or we’re dealing with a new wrinkle: computer generated water. The curtain is torn aside, revealing Girlfriend’s suddenly sopping wet head of hair, and she is stabbed to death with an ice cream cone. Though typically a very breakable item, the cone easily punctures her flesh.

We then see a fellow driving around in a classic car. He’s dressed in a clown suit and a darkly hued clown mask with bulbous red nose and frizzy dark hair, but he is NOT Girlfriend’s killer.

How many costumed freaks are roaming the streets of this town?

Then it’s off to the ice cream parlor. It looks a lot like a regular one story house on the outside. Inside, servers Mindy and Desiree are having a staring contest. They discuss the legendary boyfriend of Girlfriend, Jack. Though we never meet him, he must really be quite something. In a back office, middle aged shop owner Ricky Smith inflates a love doll. Upon the approach of one his employees, he tosses the doll onto a nearby chair, turns out the light and dives under his desk. But wouldn’t it have made more sense to hide the doll under the desk and sit in the chair himself?

A few moments later, Ricky appears in the store wearing a moosehead mask. As she’s closing up for the day, he tells his head server Vicki that the moose will be the new mascot for the business, and that the recent drought of customers will pick up.

Then, he asks her about her past:

“How was your old man? Did he ever try to touch you?”

“No!”

“AH, now, see. That’s a great old man. My old man took me out in the back one day and said he was gonna kill me because life had just passed us by and he wanted to save me the embarrassment of becoming a failure.”

Clearly not on the same wavelength, Vicki tells her boss that she only works at the shop to earn enough cash to get Double D breast implants. He seems satisfied by this news and hands her 10 bucks towards her boob job. Ricky also tells her that his big ideas, which will be revealed at tomorrow’s meeting, are gonna reshape the business.

The next day, Ricky shows up in a white suit, black shirt and bright yellow tie, looking like a Miami Vice gangster. He announces that the store will now be called Scoopettes and will no longer be family friendly.

“I’m going to bring together two of America’s favorite past times. And no, it isn’t baseball. It’s having sex and eating ice cream. Here are the new outfits: the front shows a lot of cleavage and the skirt shows off your ass and legs. And when you bend over, customers are gonna see this…”

He holds up thong panties. You can sorta see why somebody would climb into a costume to slaughter these people. The girls are absolutely ecstatic over the new uniforms and eager to get to work. Also excited is the lone male employee, a spastic creeper named Wesley.

Ricky sneaks through the dirty air ducts in his white suit and black wraparound sunglasses to spy on the Scoopettes through a gaping hole in the dressing room wall. I felt bad for the guy when he was telling all those weird stories about his father, but sullying a perfectly good white suit just to spy on women who walk around mostly naked anyway? He lost the sympathy vote.

It suddenly becomes a music video montage, with fireworks behind the women as they undress and dance nude with each other. The unforgettable hard rock song “Dairy Queen” blasts in the background.

“She was my Dairy Queen. My Daaaaaaaare-Reeeeeee Queen!”

I’m assuming the ice cream chain sued the makers of “Hot Blood Sundae.” We now see the refurbished interior of Scoopettes. It looks pretty much the same as the family friendly version, except for the addition of a life sized tiger statue wearing a blue saddle. Nothing about the place looks particularly adult oriented. Ricky is now inexplicably dressed in all black, his shirt unbuttoned to his chest and a large silver medallion hanging around his neck.

Business picks up as the girls sell flavors like Peppermint Panties, Horny Hazelnut, etc. Male customers fall all over themselves, stutter and gawk as if they’ve never seen a woman in swimwear before. The store also sells giant sized lollipops and bubble gum, kid friendly items that really wouldn’t hold much appeal for adults.

Imagine if Chuck E Cheese banned children and restaffed with stripper waitresses, but didn’t change anything else about the establishment.

Hot Blood Sundae offers cryptic innuendo that you’ll be puzzling out days, maybe even years later. For example, two Scoopette girls offers two different ice cream flavors to a leering male customer.

“They both look so good, I couldn’t choose just one!”

Hours afterward, I realized he was referring to the women, NOT the delicious desserts! See what I mean? The rich nuance, thick as sweet syrup, just goes right over my head. Deeply complex material.

New girl Paula is nervous about wearing the skimpy Scoopette uniform, but her peers discuss all the tips that have been inserted into their bikini tops over the course of the day. In the dressing room, Paula receives a message from co-worker Mindy and many kind words about her nude body as Wesley watches from the air duct. She dons the uniform and becomes an official Scoopette.

A crazed hobo with a long grey beard shows up demanding ice cream and scoping out the chicks. He fantasizes that one of the girls is riding the tiger statue.

Yes! I’ve been waiting for that tiger to come into play.

He asks for the flavor Cherry Forever and has a kind of epileptic fit before leaving.

While taking out the trash, Paula discovers that the freezing storage room in the back is filled with severed human body parts. The killer jumps out and wrestles with the newest Scoopette on the bloody floor before suffocating her to death. He wears a black bucket on his head with a scary face painted on it and eyeholes drilled through.

In his office, Ricky draws a sketch of a nude woman and writes Paula beneath it. He then menacingly eats an ice cream cone in a way that suggests he is angry at the treat.

Two more Scoopettes arrive to put away tubs of ice cream and discover Paula frozen solid. On the shelf in the background are massive cans of tomato paste, which is a rather strange ingredient in dessert food. Despite the bag over her head, the girls believe she killed herself because she didn’t like the sexy uniform. The cops show up in the form of portly Detective Pelletier and explain that poor Paula was in fact murdered. During the investigative conversation, Ricky stumbles out of his office completely drunk. After angering Pelletier, he is escorted away by Pelletier’s partner Jesse. She is dressed in a black police hat and short rubber dress with garter belts and thigh high stockings.

I guess uniform standards have really changed over at the police academy.

After closing, the Scoopette named Jodi takes a shower in the store’s locker room. She is attacked by hot water from the shower head, and then by the bucket headed killer. He axes Jodi to death while making a roaring sound and then mixes her blood and organs into the preserve bucket.

The older woman who mixes the flavors, Mrs. Zemrak, works with Wesley to make the day’s flavors. She notices that the preserves look a little too red, but shrugs it off. The Scoopettes have a lengthy whipped cream fight in the store, spraying the foamy sweetness everywhere while an idiotic rap tune blasts. Wesley dances nearby. Ryan Click, the comedic actor who plays Wesley, essentially imitates Jim Carrey the entire film. His mannerisms, delivery, cadences, etc.

As customers enjoy the Jodi-infused flavors, the crazed bearded guy shows. When the girls find a human eye in the Sexual Strawberry bucket, he begins running around the room shouting:

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

The police are called back. Ricky is completely uninterested in helping them solve anything and wants to plow ahead with selling human tainted ice cream to customers. Although the cops pull a bloody eyeball out of the mix, they incredibly still eat the stuff, claiming forensic interest. While poking around, the police find the rest of poor axed Jodi in the dumpster. Afterwards, Detective Pelletier seizes all the ice cream and waffle cones for his own use. He also asks for spoons.

Mindy shows up at work and finds the place deserted. She is attacked and drowned in a bucket of gore, before being decorated with chopped nuts and whipped cream as if she were a sundae. As the other women show up to work, a skull is uncovered in one of the serving buckets and Mindy’s body turns up.

The police stake the place out to protect the remaining Scoopettes. They also carelessly carry Mindy’s body around and put it down in various rooms.

Who needs forensic evidence?

Crazy Beard shows up again and mockingly orders an eyeball in a cone. He tells the girls to pack up and leave for their own safety. Pelletier’s female partner Jesse is axed to death by Bucket Head, who then slaughters the detective. He is stabbed with a kitchen knife about 500 times and then disemboweled. Pelletier’s death scene just goes on and on.

The customer who couldn’t choose just one earlier begins hooking up with Desiree in a back room. As she drops to her knees to unbuckle his belt, he is stabbed from behind several times. This leads to the final horrendously filmed confrontation, which reveals a shocking twist that I won’t spoil. Bucket Head is uncovered and the identity of both the clown and Crazy Beard comes to light. It all comes together.

Richard Van Vleet, the actor who plays both Crazy Beard and Ricky, is actually pretty good in both roles.

“Hot Blood Sundae” is meant in good fun as a horror comedy played for laughs, but the fact that obnoxiously loud rap metal is played every time the killer pops up takes away from the experience. I’m not a fan of choppy editing or filters that obscure the onscreen action, and there’s plenty of that here. It’s meant to be hip, edgy and stylish, but I’ve never seen an example of it improving anything.

In comedic terms, the funniest parts of “Hot Blood Sundae” are all unintentional. If you’ve seen the cover art or a trailer for this one, you have a pretty good idea of what it is. No one is sitting there asking themselves if they want to watch this, or a deeply psychological horror film like “Session 9.” It’s nowhere near the same league as a truly memorable horror indie, or one of the great horror comedies of the early 1980s.