The Gingerdead Man

The problem with this video cheapie isn't necessarily the concept. Sure the concept is cheesy and all but the film itself should abide by the rules of a good cheesy movie. Instead half of this film focuses on a teenage love triangle in bakery one scary night. It's like watching a soap opera called 'General Bakery'. The biggest plot hole here is that everyone stays inside the friggin bakery and lets a Gingerbread Man chase them around! No one ever thinks to get out or go get help when someone is hurt. Also there is no explanation whatsoever as to who the guy with the black cape was that brought the gingerbread dough to the bakery (I'm supposing it was Darth Vader). Of course it takes a little blood mixed with this dough to make an evil gingerbread man, so it just so happens someone cuts their finger while getting out the dough and viola! Vader knew it would happen.

The first couple of scenes with the Gingerdead Man made me laugh. I think it's funny to see Busey in gingerbread man form. It's just weird. But there isn't enough of him and the good stuff that makes a good cheesy straight to video flick.

The problem with this film is that it isn't fun enough. They tried to be a little too serious at times with the love story and the attempt at humor, especially the one guy acting like a superhero-ninja wannabe, can be particularly painful to watch.

I love Charles Band, his movies in the late 80's and early 90's have and still entertain me greatly, but this stuff coming out lately just ain't what it used to be.

I went into this expecting something similar to Jack Frost, the killer snowman movie. While Jack Frost was obviously a low-budget slasher flick, it was very funny. The humor was the point. In this flick, I'm quite confused as to what the point is. The story is terrible, and major plot points are plodded through just because something had to be explained.

The Gingerdead Man character lacks any humor, and the few attempts come up short. In addition, almost the entire movie takes place inside a small bakery. How much hiding, running, and action can play out here without anyone getting away? This movie had lots of potential. The premise was great, but it needed more development and better writing.

"The Gingerdead Man" has a promising plot, and thinking that it would be similar to such gems as "Jack Frost", I decided to rent it from Netflix. My rental would have been better used elsewhere.

So, here's the plot. Gary Busey, playing a psychotic killer guy, gets sent to the electric chair because of one girl's testimony. See, this girl's brother and father were killed by Psycho Busey, and because Busey didn't kill her, the girl testified against her.

Well, one night, the said girl is making a gingerbread cookie in her little bakery (that looks so rundown from the front that you wonder why anyone would ever go in there) and somehow the cookie comes to life. Now if you read the plot line on the Netflix sleeve, it says that Psycho Busey's ashes found their way into the cookie. Apparently if you cook ashes in an oven, they come back to life in the form of whatever they're in. But you don't go into movies about killer cookies looking for plot lines.

Unfortunately, "The Gingerdead Man" doesn't have anything to offer. Sure, there's Gary Busey in cookie form, and he's good for a few laughs, but the VAST majority of the movie is just filler. The 60-minute running time (does that really qualify this as a real movie?) seems like 2 hours, because most of the movie is just people running around the bakery going "what is that thing", "I think it's Gary Busey", and "well, let's run away". Except they don't run away, even if they could have easily just tore out of the bakery and ran to safety.

Ultimately, the killer cookie plot can't save this dull, horrible movie that looked like it was made for $20. Seriously, I could make this movie. It isn't even the low budget that does it in, it's the fact that the movie is just dull, it has no even somewhat cool kills and there's just not enough killer cookie goodness. I was expecting a "so bad it's good" movie, but I just got a really, really bad movie that wasn't even unintentionally funny. Disappointment.

Sometimes you've just gotta watch a stinker, and this undoubtedly fits that bill. It's the brief (but not quite brief enough) saga of a cold-blooded killer who's put to death, then somehow returns to life as a stabbin', laughin', wise-crackin', foot-tall slab of holiday confectionery. As if that premise needed a little extra kick, this monstrous devil-cookie also happens to be voiced by Gary Busey. The concept itself is hilarious for all of ten minutes, but burns out quickly as the plot tries, courageously but hopelessly, to make us care about his victims. It's atrociously acted of course, the equivalent of D-grade porn stars who keep their clothes on, so those misguided storytelling efforts don't even have a fighting chance. A moment rarely passes without some manner of absurd stupidity. If it isn't a particularly bad pun, a wickedly awful special effect or a pathetic dash of vacant dialog, surely there's a glaringly obvious editing mistake in view. We're talking night-becomes-day-becomes-night, several times in the same scene. Removing a baking pan from the oven with bare hands, commenting on how its contents are freshly scorched, then casually setting it aside. Firing seventeen times from a six-shooter. Though it runs for just an hour and ten minutes, that seems about twice as long as it should've. I had almost as much fun glancing at the cover art as I did watching the entire thing.

What is it that makes this Charles Brand tick away? This guy is like the not-quite-as-talented step-son of Roger Corman, producing hundreds of films, very few of them people actually probably legitimately like with a straight face (let alone those he might have, heaven forbid, directed). I didn't know this until I a) looked him up on IMDb, and b) was subjected to The Gingerdead Man, one of his recent, um, "features". I bought it thinking I'd get some laughs, after all it's hard to not find the prospect of a Chucky-style killer in the form of a Gingerbread Man (voiced by Gary Busey himself) quite tempting as a truly fun bad movie. But I didn't expect it to be this boring, this absolutely dreadful, so abysmally acted to the point where I wished my own bed-ridden Grandmother could walk on to the set and wipe the floor with these other "actors" with her own non-existent acting chops.

Oh sure, Brand *tries* to put a story together, something close to it I suppose, involving a bakery called, um, "bakery", and how it is under threat from a Mondo Burger style competition of a new bakery across the street and how the workers cant seem to cope and, uh, work into the late hours of the night and then one of them cuts his finger and so conveniently blood drips into the flour and the electricity goes off on.... damn, you get the idea. What little hope I had for the movie, perhaps from the trailer, was moot. Brand probably does know how to put together a trailer for a movie - looking at the one for this and a couple other "Full Moon" productions on the DVD it looks like that is their real metee - but the actual film is um... a film? More like a string of terrible, inexcusable and inconceivably written scenes strung together by wretchedly done "attacks" from the pastry on his dumb-as-wood victims. The only thing more stupid and ridiculous is how the poor little feller meets his/its end.

I wish I could recommend this, I wish I could say this is the "shiznit" of killer-whatever movies that you can turn off your brain and enjoy as fun schlock. I can't, in good conscience, ever do that. If it weren't for Gary Busey's little bits of "WTF-ness", I might have come close to slitting my wrists and swearing a life of nothing but Ozu and Bergman for the rest of my life.