Swirlee is a short film about a sad man who just wants to be like everybody else, but he can’t—because he’s made of ice cream. Swirlee is a wild, one of a kind film that’s darkly delicious. Writer Chris Gore summed up the indie short nicely: “Swirlee is like Goodfellas meets The Elephant Man by way of Edward Scissorhands.” The fifteen-minute movie was meant to be just a cog in a larger project, but now stands as a tantalizing glimpse of what might have been.

Swirlee was the brainchild of actor James Lorinz. He’s appeared in such cult classics as Street Trash (1987) and Frankenhooker (1990), in which he had the lead role. His resume also includes an episode from the first season of NYPD Blue, which starred friend David Caruso. Lorinz wrote a rough draft of the unconventional Swirlee when he was a film student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. But the idea had come to him much earlier.

I remember always waiting for Mister Softee to come down the block, and the truck would come and you’d see his cartoon face and you’d think, “What if this guy was alive? What would it be like?” (from Cheap Scares!: Low Budget Horror Filmmakers Share Their Secrets)

A fellow student was cast as the lead, but the project failed to get off the ground. Lorinz envisioned a film that would have the realism of Raging Bull, but be a black comedy. He wanted audiences to take the Swirlee character seriously—after the initial shock of seeing a man with an ice cream cone for a head.

I wanted to do a story about a guy who wasn’t totally human, but I would make the audience accept him through the urbane relationships he has with the various characters. I would put in elements of exploitation that would appeal to distributors (making it a gangster picture with violence and sex), but I would retain the very human story about this poor deformed guy. In other words, if I can get the audience to accept the image of the ice cream cone within five minutes, and to understand the kind of story it’s going to be, then it won’t be a gimmick, and the story will play out as drama, which makes it funny. (from The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made)

 

“Try me, I’m delicious.”

In this world, Swirlee was born made of ice cream because his mother took a flawed drug called “Nodropinem.” An unknown side effect of the medication was a baby that is the manifestation of any food the mother craved during pregnancy.
 

 
In 1990, after Lorinz completed work on a sitcom, he used some of the money he had earned—$10,000—to shoot test footage. By then, he had hired someone to rewrite and flesh-out the Swirlee script. Lorinz was now playing the title role, and half of the budget went to his makeup, which took two hours to put on and an hour to remove.
 

 
Other cast members include a pre-fame David Caruso, who plays the protagonist’s perpetually agitated roommate; and Tony Darrow, who appeared alongside Lorinz in Street Trash. Darrow plays a mobster who controls the flow of frozen dessert products. His name? Don Tofutti!
 

 
The test footage was edited to create a trailer and a short film, which would be screened for potential funders of a feature-length motion picture. The film was pitched to at least one production company, who wanted to turn Swirlee into a comedy for kids. Sticking to his guns, Lorinz essentially told them to “fuck off.” The project yielded no takers and was eventually shelved. Years later, Lorinz revised the script, turning Swirlee into a killer, and writing what he’s said are “provocative sexual scenes.” A feature has yet to be produced.
 

 
During the period that David Caruso was being mocked for leaving the successful NYPD Blue for a film career, some of the Swirlee footage aired on the tabloid TV show, Hard Copy.
 

Newspaper clipping, September 7, 1994.

The trailer and short film are all that remains of Swirlee. Over the years, the short has been occasionally shown publicly, including a 2006 screening at a Street Trash reunion. That night, it aired for a packed house, and Lorinz was thrilled to see the audience enjoying it.
 

 
Though Lorinz’s character is called “Mister Softee” in the short, the name of the project was later changed to Swirlee to avoid a potential lawsuit from the ice cream truck franchisor.
 

 
Download Swirlee for free via the Internet Archive.