Well I’m back to fatigue, readers. I’m doing my best to crank these out in a timely manner without phoning them in, which is a lot easier when the movies are enjoyable, but this evening I had to resist the urge to just write “It sucks” and post it. This movie is so bad that I really don’t even feel like talking about it, but I took on this obligation myself so lets see if I can pull some words out of my ass to summarize my disgust.
1997’s Jack Frost, a movie about a killer resurrected as a vengeful snowman, is so very much within the Full Moon wheelhouse that most people who don’t know any better just assume it is one of the company’s films. It is my personal belief that Charles Band seethed about that for years, let it cook in the back of his mind and then took that hatred and made a movie that is basically Jack Frost, but different.
Gingerdead Man outright steals Jack Frost’s premise (which admittedly was pretty heavily bit off of Child’s Play.) Our killer (Gary Busey as Millard Findlemeyer) is a crazed man who kills two people in a dinner, leaving a woman (Margaret Blye as Betty) and her daughter (Robin Sydney as Sarah) alive. Their testimony sentences Findlemeyer to death and his vengeful mother, who is a witch, mixes his ashes with some gingerbread mix and sends it to Sarah and Betty’s bakery.
As they’re mixing up the dough Brick (Jonathan Chase), one of the bakery’s employees who is training to be a wrestler named Butcher Baker, cuts himself and bleeds in the dough. Sarah makes the dough into a gingerbread man and puts it in Chekov’s walk-in baking oven, only to find the daughter of the restaurateur who has tried to buy her out planting a rat to get her shut down by the health department. The two women fight, falling against a circuit breaker which causes a massive jolt of electricity to shock the gingerbread man.
So… what exactly animated this thing? The dough should have already been enough yet it needed blood and electricity as a catalyst? Did the witch make these things happen or was this contrived set of circumstances just something the witch hoped would happen to resurrect her son as a murderous cookie?
It doesn’t matter, The Gingerdead Man is AWFUL. He’s every annoying trait about goofy video-era monsters like The Wishmaster and Leprechaun. he’s got bad puns, he’s got a bakery themed weapon motif. This is Gary Busey slumming it to the max, the man was once a supremely talented actor but here he’s barely even collecting a paycheck. I feel embarrassed for him.
The movie is incredibly boring and not much happens; it’s only an hour long but it seemingly lasts forever. Finally at the very end something great happens when the cookie man is dispatched exactly as you would imagine he would be and watching someone wolf down a blood-filled cookie is disgusting and nuts and almost redeemed the movie in my eyes.
Moreso than Evil Bong or even Killjoy, The Gingerdead Man is a terrible movie that’s not even slightly worth watching. I’m mad at myself for making myself watch it, I’m mad at myself for watching it too late to watch something else and write it up instead. It’s bad and everyone involved should feel bad.
Watch, Toss, Or Buy? TOSS.
If You Liked This, Watch: Jack Frost (1997), Child’s Play (1988), Child’s Play 2 (1990), Child’s Play 3 (1991), Bride of Chucky (1998), Seed of Chucky (2004), Curse of Chucky (2013), Leprechaun (1993), Rumplestiltskin (1995), Wishmaster (1997)