The Gingerdead Man

There are three extra chromosomes in this picture. Can you find them all?After the credits we're treated to a really boring scene of the same girl making dough in the most poorly-lit bakery in the history of bakeries. She hears a thump at the door and goes to investigate. Outside, a cloaked woman is running around a corner and there's a box labeled "Grandma's Best" or some lame shit like that at the door. The girl (who we come to know as "Sarah") does what any rational person would and takes the box back inside with her.

I can kind of empathize, I guess. You're preparing a bakery for the next morning, chances are you're going to be tired. But no matter how tired I was, I sure as fuck wouldn't accept a box of dough from a woman dressed like Gargamel from "The Smurfs." I guess I could be confused! Maybe the small town the movie takes place in has a midnight dough-delivery service and it's run by kindly druids.

After that fascinating scene we're introduced to Otis. Otis has lead a rough life. Judging by the way he talks his parents force him to eat a teaspoon of carpenter's glue every day, and he has quite possibly the two most boring hobbies a person can have: baking and professional wrestling. And by god, he talks about them both. Incessantly. Otis does not have one line that does not involve pro wrestling or making cookies. If I were riding an elevator down to the first floor of a skyrise with Otis, I would smash his face in with the emergency phone far before we touched ground.

Shortly after Otis stumbles on set we meet Sarah's mother, Betty. Betty has had a rough life, too: Since the death of her husband she has been consumed with running her bakery, drinking a bunch, and antagonizing the restaurant owner across the street.

But that's okay. Of the seven characters in "Gingerdead Man," only one (Sarah) is not a horribly written, stereotypical gimmick with a terrible accent. You know those movies where a big city boy has to go to some small town to do something for his job? And how the characters he meets are a bunch of quirky, endearing rednecks who eventually win him over? Well, "Gingerdead Man" is full of those rednecks minus the quirkiness or endearing qualities.

So Betty, the stereotypical drunk, is standing in front of her bakery with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a shotgun in the other. She fires said shotgun at the diner across the street and knocks down one of its banners. Please note that, besides cutting a piece of string from the banner and making it fall off the building, the shotgun does not do any more damage to the diner or its multiple windows. Maybe she actually has a pump-action sniper rifle. Who knows?

Sarah and her friend, Julia, (who might as well have been named "plot device"), round Betty's drunk ass up. They're confronted by the diner owner, who, of course, drives a convertible Cadillac and wears a cowboy hat. The movie tries to convey some message about big business ruining mom-and-pop shops, then we cut back to the inside of the bakery, where Otis performs maybe the biggest OSHA violation I've ever seen. In short, he cuts his finger while opening the "Grandma's Cookies" box and gushes approximately six gallons of blood into the dough.

This isn't a normal cut, either: He bleeds more than a hemophiliac pig that just got stabbed with a turkey baster full of blood. Instead of bandaging the wound or even washing it off, however, he dumps the contents in a mixer and bleeds all over them. But it's not a rebellion thing. He just doesn't notice that the dough he threw in the mixer is bright pink and swarming with redneck germs.

After it gets done mixing Otis flattens the AIDS-dough out and cuts it into the world's largest gingerbread cookie. He throws it in an oven and walks offset, possibly to masturbate furiously to pictures of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, using his blood as lubricant.

Then the real fun begins.