“The Gingerdead Man” DVD (Review)

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My junior year of college, I wrote a short story for Creative Writing class about a homicidal gingerbread boy. The course instructor had been rather hard on many of my efforts that quarter — we were supposed to be writing literature, not “genre material” — and she wasn’t particularly thrilled with my latest stab a storytelling. I ultimately changed my major that year to Film after finding Creative Writing too stifling and Journalism too banal. I had to take summer courses my last two years of college to make up for all the lost time I’d spent dipping my toes in different academic pools, but I won the “Excellence in Screenwriting” award my senior year for a script about Santa Claus’ homicidal brother. Boo yah!

I shelved my homicidal gingerbread boy concept after the first “Shrek” was released in 2001. Despite not being a mass murderer, the character of Gingy had stolen my thunder, and I felt the void left open for a squeaky-voiced baked good in our popular culture had finally been filled. How wrong I was.

I picked up “The Gingerdead Man” as a blind buy yesterday at Fangoria’s Weekend of Horrors. I’d remembered seeing it on the shelf at Blockbuster way back in ‘05, and trying desperately to talk my then-girlfriend into renting it. Alas, even the star power of Gary Busey as the killer cookie was not enough to sell the film on her. At any rate, I’ve been an eligible bachelor for an agonizing period of time now and free to buy or rent whatever I choose. Unfortunately, too often I end up getting crap like “The Gingerdead Man” when I really should know better.

I don’t believe that a movie can be “so bad it’s good.” A film is either good or it isn’t. When people say, “Oh, it’s no ‘Citizen Kane,’” I break out in hives. Is that the only yardstick by which we’re measuring a film’s quality now? “Citizen Kane?” If so, why don’t they make movies like it anymore? I’ll tell you why: “Citizen Kane” is a crashing bore that bombed at the box office during its initial theatrical run. It was booed at the Oscars way back in the ‘42, and I echo the sentiment today.

That being said, a given film’s quality isn’t in how well it stacks up against “Citizen Kane,” whether you like that film or not. What makes a good movie is how well the story is told. It’s as simple as that. This is why I hate loglines — 25-word distillations of a film. A logline is not a story. I’ve never seen anyone pay money to hear a logline. That producers gauge their interest in a film based on its logline is excellent proof as to why so many movie suck today.

Good stories can be told in any genre. It stands to reason a good story could’ve been told about a homicidal gingerbread boy; I tried at least. But “The Gingerdead Man” doesn’t seem to want to even bother. Instead we get a flick that has a running time of barely an hour without credits and a homicidal gingerbread man who kills two whole people. TWO!!! More people die at the hands of Gary Busey’s Millard Findlemeyer character before he turns into the titular Gingerdead Man.

At the beginning of the film, Findlemeyer goes on a shooting rampage — though the bullet hits are all woefully off-camera — in an extremely unpopulated diner. He’s arrested (off-camera), put on trial (off-camera) and speedily executed via the electric chair (off-camera). It’s almost artistic how the filmmakers completely invert the “show, don’t tell” convention of cinematic storytelling.

Months later, the only survivor of the shooting rampage, Sarah Leigh (har-har), who happens to work at a bakery, receives a delivery of what she believes is gingerbread cookie mix (it’s really Findlemeyer’s cremated ashes). While preparing the mix, one of Sarah’s co-workers cuts his hand and bleeds in the dough. Sarah cuts a single gingerbread boy out of the wad of blood-infused dough. She gives it a face and a bowtie. Then into the oven it goes. The oven short circuits for some reason and Findlemeyer is resurrected — in an overly-complicated manner — as the Gingerdead Man!

I was sort of amused by the fact that just baking his ashes in with the gingerbread wouldn’t bring Findlemeyer back from the grave. No, you have to add a teaspoon of blood to the mix and zap the dough with some electrical current. More, it was Findlemeyer’s vengeful mother who delivered her son’s ashes to the bakery. How she knew that doing so would bring her little Busey back to life is anyone’s guess.

The problem with reviewing this film is that the more I say about it, the better the movie sounds. But I’m not being hyperbolic when I call this movie bilge. Even with an hour-long running time, it seems like it just goes on and on and on. All the while, it misses every opportunity to do something, anything with the concept that would remotely resemble entertainment. This is the kind of story that could actually be summed up in 25 words or less. I’m sure my Creative Writing instructor would’ve loathed it.

-Brad Lohan

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