The Gingerdead Man

Welcome to the Faggot Car! Next stop, Gary Busey's acting career!

"Gingerdead Man" is just over an hour long. Although almost nothing happens during the scenes I just told you about, they take up a good forty-five minutes of movie time. At this point in the film I was expecting something – anything – to happen. After watching some inbred chucklefuck spray his tainted blood on a box of haunted cookie dough, the movie could have switched over to a bunch of Tony Little infomercials and I would have jumped for joy. However, instead of doing something, you know, watchable or entertaining, Full Moon Productions decided to take a new route. A fresh, exciting route. A route that features a gigantic animatronic gingerbread cookie crawling out of a walk-in oven and cackling madly.

I guess I should take time to explain something else now. Like I said, you can't understand much of what the people in "Gingerdead Man" are saying. What you can hear, however, is undoubtedly one of three things:

1. Otis talking about wrestling
2. A "witty" comment involving some kind of pun about things at a bakery
3. Someone shouting a non-sequitur.

Here's what any given snippet of audible dialogue sounds like:

Otis: Ah'd like to give that leetle sumbitch uh piledriver!
Sarah: Submitch? More like Killsbury Doughboy!
Betty: BEAN BURRITO PANCAKES? YES, I'D LOVE TO GO SWIMMING IN LACH NESS IF THEY FILLED IT WITH TOMATO SOUP

I wish I could say the characters in the movie really didn't look like this.

The evil gingerbread man is no exception to this. He climbs out of the oven's red lights with a glimmer in his eye and a spring in his step. He grabs a knife off the counter, looks directly at Sarah, and says the most inspiring words I've ever heard from a demented bakery treat:

"Roll this dough, bitch"

Honestly, who the fuck writes that line? And more importantly, who reads it and, instead of bitch-slapping the person who wrote it, thinks that anything involving that piece of dialogue could be even mildly entertaining? I mean, did someone read it, kind of lean back in his chair, and say "Boys, I think we have a blockbuster"? Of course not, because at "Full Moon Productions," they don't believe in chairs! They believe in asphyxiating themselves until one of them goes on some sort of crazy oxygen-deprived rant and then boom, there's a fucking movie! Either that or they're Pentecostals and they speak in tongues to their pagan goat-god, then run the conversations through Babelfish and use that to decide on their upcoming projects.

Around this time two more stereotypes introduce themselves. One of them, Jimmy, is a "bad boy" type – you know he's a bad boy because he's wearing mascara and one of those hilarious 50's-throwback "TOP TEN REASONS FOR BEER" shirts – and his girlfriend, Lorna, is a dumb blonde beauty queen and the daughter of Evil Diner Owner. Evil Diner Owner shows up looking for his daughter when the gingerbread man, who has sufficiently scared the bakery people by growling at them shaking back and forth, runs over him.

That's right. A gingerbread man gets in a car, uses a rolling pin as a lever for the pedals, and runs over Evil Diner Owner. I couldn’t come up with this shit if I tried. I guess I should start sucking dicks for coke money. Maybe that will aim my mind in the right direction.

The kids in the diner kind of run around and fight with one another. In fact, much of the time in the bakery is spent showing Sarah and her squabbles with Lorna, while the gingerbread cookie runs around and kills people.

Or tries to kill people. That's right, folks: in the sequence of fuck-ups we've come to know as "The Gingerdead Man," precisely two people are killed by the title character's hand. On top of that, in a true show of premature cinematic ejaculation, both of those people are killed within ten minutes of the gingerbread man showing up. Shortly after her father is killed, Lorna discovers the body and gets stabbed straight through the forehead. By a knife the gingerbread man threw. This tells us that not only is the Gingerdead Man lethal, he could have been an MLB pitcher if his life had taken a different course.

So what does this leave the rest of the cast to do? Run around and scream for a little bit. Sarah discovers that the dough was made from Gary Busey's ashes, and that his mother was the woman in the cloak. This doesn't do much but prove that those stupid "Chuck Norris" jokes everyone is telling are actually miscredited and should be attributed to Gary Busey, since I seriously doubt Chuck Norris' ashes could animate a psychopathic gingerbread cookie.

Also, one of the other girls ("plot device") is knocked unconscious by the gingerbread man, then dragged into a cooler. When the others discover her she is nude and covered in whipped cream and cherries. At some point somebody mentions the phrase "sex cookie." Maybe now you people understand why I hate my life.

Thankfully the movie ends shortly after the second murder, and the "sex cookie" scene, but not before some more stupid shit happens. Otis realizes that since the killer is a cookie, he can probably be eaten. And eat Otis does – he pins Gary Busey's gingerbread effigy to the floor and chows down. Then, he delivers what is undoubtedly the culminating line of the film, a quip so powerful it's more effective than "Roll this, bitch" could ever be:

"Got milk?"

But all's not well. The evil cookie infects Otis' bloodstream and turns him into a gigantic killer cookie. A gigantic killer cookie that is literally onscreen for less than two minutes. In maybe one of the most disjointed, nonsensical scenes in the entire film, the three survivors (Sarah, "plot device," and Jimmy) carry out a foolproof plan: shove the Gingerdead Man in an oven and blow him up even though the movie has given several mentions that the bakery's power is out.

For whatever reason (possibly Newton's 3rd Law of Shitty Movies), the plan works and the Otis cookie explodes in the oven. The movie cuts to some generic "a year later" screen, where Sarah has taken over the bakery with Jimmy, who is now her boyfriend. An old woman in a cloak comes up to them with a box of "Grandma's Best" cookies.

"Would you care for some of my special recipe?" She asks?

"Not on your life," Sarah says.

And that's the end of the movie. That's it. Full Moon Productions managed to make a movie where the only thing more anticlimactic than the first ending was the second one.

So, an hour of my life ruined, I will return the "Gingerdead Man" DVD back to Netflix like the haunted tape on "The Ring." Only, instead of making some scary chick with long hair jump out of a TV, I hope the DVD lodges itself right square up Gary Busey's ass.

– Evan "Pantsfish" Wade