Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver

This film shocked me. I am usually criticizing Bill Butler for his awful directing, but this may just be his best film... despite being a low budget Full Moon picture, and the third in a series, it was legitimately funny and a well-made film. (Unlike "Evil Bong 3", which is a waste of time.)

Without Gary Busey, you need a good voice to be the homicidal gingerbread man. John Carl Buechler? Good choice. We also have Robin Sydney here (in a very small role) and some great parodies of "Silence of the Lambs" and "Carrie".

I will not say this is a "great" film, but it is a fun film. I enjoyed it more than I expected, and I was not even drunk. It looks like a part four may be coming sooner or later, but that might not be the worst thing if done right...

The third part of the GINGERDEAD MAN franchise from Full Moon, and surprisingly the best yet; you'd expect the quality to drop as the series goes on, as is the case with mainstream cinema, but this one's gone from being awful to being not awful for a very low budget production. This time around the story involves time travel, with the antihero fleeing the authorities and ending up at a roller disco in 1976. The acting is pretty awful, as ever, but the writing has improved and there are fun spoofs of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and CARRIE along the way, alongside the cheesy gore. A sequel, which combines this franchise with the EVIL BONG franchise, followed.

Gingerbread Man 3 (2011) and the entire series are currently available for free on Tubi. This installment follows a similar storyline to the previous films, but instead of focusing on the Gingerbread Man on a movie set, it takes place in a roller rink that's about to go bankrupt. Somehow, they also manage to work in a high school subplot that strangely resembles Carrie.

Directed by William Butler (Dead Voices, Deadly Dolls, Demonic Toys 2), the film stars Carrie Lazar (Preacher), Mike Manning (Teen Wolf), Robin Sydney (Corona Zombies), and Kimberly Dawn Guerrero (Anchorman).

The storyline is as bad as it sounds, but the entertainment value is better than you'd expect. This is probably the weakest of the first three films, but it's not a total waste if you enjoy cheesy horror. There are a few clever lines that provide a good laugh, though the kill scenes rely too heavily on CGI. Overall, I'd give this movie a 3.5/10.

Gingerdead Man 3 is a very strange movie even when compared to the previous movies. It feels too mean spirited at times to be likeable and it doesn't work when it tries to parody scenes from other movies. Also the effects (practical and visual effects) are much worse than they are in the first two movies which didn't have great effects either.

Gingerdead Man 3 is a bizarre chaotic experience but I don't think I would say it's one I liked overall

Grade: C.

The idea of rude humor and purposefully sexist comedy is fine--but you have to actually be funny. And you have to make something that holds together as a movie--I mean to sit through a feature length mess is not a good time.

The standards for this series as far as something that looks like a movie are low but this one is a new low. A Lousy sound job with obvious and much post production dubbing of voices is probably the shoddiest element. The sound dubbing is no bad it almost sounds like a commentary track playing over the actual film sound--and mostly sounds are just missing.

Director Butler doesn't show an understanding of how to shoot a movie it almost looks like it's shot and edited live--frequently the shots jump from one to another from a real location to poor sets.

The editing struggles to cut from one camera angle to another without it looking like each show was done at a different location. The original footage is badly shot so I'll give the editor a bit of a break--one of these "you can't make chicken soup from chicken sh**, still there is no pace to the movie.

The movie boast out of focus shots right in the first couple of minutes during a shoddy Silence of the Lambs parody--the kind of bad sketch comedy that would be editing out of any other movie.

There are also ,crappy Digital and practical effects and acting that is elementary school talent show rejection level. Most of this can be blamed on Butler and, I'm sure, a super short shooting schedule. Then again this was made in Los Angeles where there are more actors than anywhere else on the planet so why you'd pick these people? Even for no money there are so many to choose from.

Only possible note is that unlike the totally lazy films that Charlie Band directs himself, Butler actually has some ambition--to actually shoot in a real roller rink for a day or two and actually have some digital effects.

If you liked the previous films I guess you can add one star to my review but still not something worth your time.

Full Moon films seem stuck in many ways to what wasn't so great in the 1990's. Only back then they had, per film, budgets that now represent an entire years worth of movies. Sad.