Director: Charles Band
Starring: Gary Busey, Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke
“Daddy, you’ve got to come and get me. I’m at Betty’s Bakery and we’ve got homicidal baked goods after us.” (Lorna, The Gingerdead Man)
Sometimes a film title is so great you just know in your heart that the film has to be fantastic. Often though, especially in the B-movie horror genre, the movie fails to deliver on the quality of the title. The Gingerdead Man is unfortunately a prime example of this.
The film starts off with a flashback of a killer (played by Gary Busey) shooting up a restaurant then shooting a girl called Sarah as he leaves. Sarah survives, unlike the rest of her family, and is working in her bakery later when she hears that the killer is getting the electric chair.
As luck would have it, the killer is executed just as she’s cooking a gingerbread man. After getting into a scrap with a local beauty queen, Sarah accidentally sends a power surge into the oven, causing the killer’s soul to travel through the electricity and into the gingerbread man she’s cooking. Cue ridiculous scenes with a tiny pastry swearing at people and threatening to cut their fingers off.
Despite the admittedly ace title The Gingerdead Man is an atrocious film, with acting that verges on the level of a primary school play and special effects that look like someone spent half an hour learning how to use a Mac for the first time.
What’s more, the Gingerdead Man himself is a rubbish character. His face is boring, his dialogue is horrible (“well, I sure ain’t the Pillsbury fucking Doughboy”) and most of the time you can tell he’s just a rubbish hand puppet that someone’s working from the inside. When he fires a gun in one scene you can even make out the hand holding the gun in place at one point.
The characters are vapid, their mock southern accents are horrible, one guy is an absolute cock yet manages to get the wholesome girl without really doing anything, and the ‘twist’ ending is so laughably bad that I had to rewind it to make sure it was definitely meant to be a twist.
The only positive thing about The Gingerdead Man is that at just under 70 minutes long it’s mercifully short, leaving you more time afterwards to watch genuinely entertaining films. This one should have been left in the oven to burn yet, amazingly, it has two sequels (The Passion Of The Crust and Saturday Night Cleaver), which both also seem to have had more work spent on the title than the film.
That Was A Bit Mental 
7 thoughts on “The Gingerdead Man (2005)”