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.”
It’s got choreography, wrestling star Bill Goldberg in the title role, and the on-screen murders of Chris Kattan and Fran Drescher. It’s violent, misanthropic, shit-headed, and tough to improve on (especially for the movie’s remaining 70 minutes).
So it’s with a bit of ambivalence that I pass on Bloody-Disgusting’s post sharing the trailer for Gingerdead Man 2: The Passion Of The Crust, due on shelves at a to-be-determined date this year. Just like last time, there’s a talking, murderous little fellow spewing baked-good puns and a greedy entrepreneur providing some sort of secondary plot. (No Busey involved this time, as far as I can tell.) It takes place on the set of a crappy horror movie, amping up the implied message of, “Hey, you dudes like this campy slasher dreck, right? Good deal, bro!” Still, there’s one hopeful sign that it’ll really run with the excess this time and slam itself into the ground good and proper.
That said, I have been let down by a movie crucifixion before. Yes, amazingly, it is possible to make such a thing underwhelming. In the 2004 Belgian film Calvaire (The Ordeal), a hokey singer finds himself imprisoned by an inkeeper who intends to keep our poor hero as a wife (and/or torture and kill him). At one point, we see the protagonist tied to a cross-like structure for safekeeping. And that’s about it. (That said, this scene sort of made up for the disappointment). It’s proof that, unless done to the extreme, certain moronic, evil, horrible things are merely a waste of time.
