Gingerdead Man 3: Saturday Night Cleaver

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.

After escaping from jail, The Gingerdead Man finds himself in a time machine destined for killing and roller disco.

Opening with a highly amusing Silence of the Lambs paradox including a muffin throwing his cream over Clarissa Darling stating he can smell her Muff-in, you know what in for - or do you? The previous Gingerdead instalments were B-average at best and this is no exception.

Once Ginger goes back to the 70's it's a series of some Porky's gags mixed with scene on scenes of roller skating linked by some t & a and few and far between kill scenes including gun play, acid attack and a nail gun assault. By the end it all crumbles apart with annoying kids and time travelling history figures cameos.

While no one expects Oscar material from Full Moon you always hope for some-kind of return to former glory. You could spend 80 minutes watching Puppet Master or Blood Dolls but if your a fan of Gingerdead and 1976 this one will roller Boogie you to death.

It's weird how film concepts get lost in translation. When the The Gingerdead Man (2005) was released, it had a certain level of groundwork that it needed to cover. Unfortunately, it only covered enough to make the practically hour long movie far from anything worth more than one watch - even with its minimal strengths. Then came Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust (2008) which was even less of an entertaining installment. The continuity was loose, the characters were even less likable and the whole motivation behind the killer cookie was dropped. Now we have this movie, which quite honestly is baffling for several reasons. Nothing makes sense here.

The movie starts off with an actress knock-off look alike of Clarice from Silence of the Lambs (1991) looking to interview the gingerdead man. But wait, didn't the gingerdead man get burnt to a crisp in the last film? And before that wasn't he burnt to a crisp then too? How does he keep coming back? One word - continuity. Also, the place where the gingerdead man is staying is at a psychiatric ward of homicidal baked goods. So the writers mean to say that Millard Findlemeyer wasn't the only serial killer who had a mother who knew witchcraft in homemade pastries? This is really poor writing. Why does William Butler, a person who has exceptional credentials allow an at least potentially fun franchise go down the wrong path of a good production.

A few minutes in, the gingerdead man escapes and happens to find two scientists completing a time machine. So what does Mr. Findlemeyer do? He jumps in of course a decides to use it to help him evade the authorities. The end result is seeing him land in the middle of a discotech in 1976. This ends up pissing the evil (and stupid) cookie off, but he ends up finding a way to cope. How? By killing various people of course. Don't get to excited though because it takes an awfully long time for anything to get going. At least in the first movie it only focused on a small group of people. Here, the audience is introduced to a ton new individuals that don't excel or help move what little plot there already is.

The main focus is given to a character named Cherry, a parody of Stephen King's Carrie (1976), the difference being that it takes place at a discotech instead of a prom. Other than that, no other actor makes their characters stand out among the rest. In fact, this movie loves to show a lot of scenes of nothing - specifically scenes of girls giggling and screaming for really silly things. It's just annoying. There was one scene that viewers may enjoy but that's it. The only other thing that helps boost the quality of this picture is the CGI but even then it's too late in some cases. Specifically during the kill scenes, instead of using practical effects, they were replaced with CGI and it looks bad. Topping it off is the fact of adding a ridiculous idea of time travel to an already ridiculously silly (although potentially entertaining) concept of a possessed cookie.

It may make viewers laugh in a scene or two,...maybe. This better than average low budget production still has practically no plot, transparent characters and poorly executed kill scenes.

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 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.