Will Gingerdead Man 2 achieve optimum trashiness?
My memories of Gingerdead Man are vague at best, and that’s a poor sign. This is a shitty horror movie in which a serial killer gets reincarnated as a gingerbread man, voiced by Gary Busey. Even in straight-to-video territory, it’s a crime not to tackle a concept like this with all the imagination it can handle. A good B- or even F-horror film always leaves behind some image that’s vividly ridiculous, even in the film’s own terms. Take Dead Alive, for example. Fully delighted to see a zombie rip a guy’s dick off? Well, that still won’t prepare you for a priest to leap out, stir up a kung-fu typhoon, and proclaim: “I kick ass for the lord!”
Gingerdead Man didn’t have anything like this. None of the deaths were especially crazy, except that a demon-cookie made them happen, and that is something you take for granted when watching a deliberately goofy film. It ended my brief fascination with the horror garbage on the shelves at my local video store. In something akin to the experiment of our new feature I Watched This On Purpose, I went into that hoping to find some kind of redeeming quality–in this case, a gleeful and deliberate embrace of the film’s pure stupidity and worthlessness. That phase kicked off with Santa’s Slay, which aces its excess-within-excess qualifier in the magnificent opening scene. Yes, magnificent. Hey, you didn’t come up with the line “Thank you for not making us poor. Or Samoan.”