Charles Band
Millard Findlemeyer (Gary Busey) robs Cadillac Jack's Diner and decides to
shoot and stab all of the customers while he's there. Among the victims are
bakery owner James Leigh (Newell Alexander) and his two grown children.
The daughter - Sarah (Robin Sydney) - was lucky enough to survive her
gunshot wound that fateful day, and it was her testimony that eventually ended
up putting Millard away and onto death row. After his date with the electric
chair, Millard's body is cremated and his ashes are sent back to his mother. Two
days after the execution, Sarah is at work at her family's bakery when someone
wearing a black cloak leaves a box of "Grandma's Gingerbread Seasoning" at the
back door. Sarah's highly annoying, profession wrestling obsessed co-worker
Brick (Jonathan Chase) accidentally cuts himself while opening the box
and drizzles some blood into the seasoning. Never mind that, it's mixed in with
some flour anyway to make cookie dough. With that level of quality control, it's
no wonder the place on the verge of closing down.
Across the street, a chain restaurant is about to open that threatens to put the
Leigh's bakery out of business. Sarah's mother Betty (Margaret Blye),
who's taken to the bottle since the murders of her husband and son, attempts to
shoot their banner down with a shotgun. Jimmy Dean (Larry Cedar), the
loud-mouth, cowboy-hat-wearing owner of the rival eatery who has a bitchy, wanna-be model daughter named Lorna (Alexia Aleman), offers
to buy Sarah out for 50,000 thousand dollars but she refuses. Lorna sneaks in
with a rat in an attempt to get them closed down by the health department, the
ladies get into a cat fight, Lorna's punk-with-a-heart-of-gold boyfriend Amos (Ryan
Locke) pops in to break them up, the oven goes haywire and a large
gingerbread cookie baking in the oven comes to life. Yes, a walking, talking,
killing gingerbread cookie voiced by Gary Busey. If that doesn't scream "Camp!"
I don't know what does. The cookie gets to cut off a finger, jump in a car and
smash a guy against the wall and knock a girl out with a skillet and then make
an ice cream sundae out of her (complete with strategically placed cherries). It
also gets to make terrible jokes about ladyfingers, drunks and reminds us that
it "sure ain't the Pillsbury Fucking Doughboy."
Because of Busey's presence (he has about five minutes of actual screen time and
the rest is just him voicing the cookie) and the ridiculous, outlandish premise,
this ended up making money on DVD. Unfortunately, it's all rather terrible...
and not in a very good or enjoyable way either. This is one of those movies that
tries to defy being called idiotic by being intentionally idiotic: it wants so
desperately to be camp. Therein lies the big problem; this is far too forced and
obvious to be even remotely amusing if you're above the age of about 8. The
combination of terrible acting, awful dialogue, corny one-liners, murky,
flat-looking photography, poor lighting and, perhaps most especially, a roster
of extremely annoying, toilet mouthed, over-the-top characters sink this in no
time. There's not enough material here to even push this to a proper feature
run-time. If you exclude the very-slow-moving opening and closing credits, this
actually runs less than one hour.
John Carl Buechler and Magical Media Industries created the creature
effects, though there's not much in the way of gore and the body count is
surprisingly low. It was co-written by Silvia St. Croix (probably a pseudonym for William Butler), who went on to direct GINGERDEAD MAN 2: PASSION OF THE CRUST (2008).
There was also GINGERDEAD MAN 3: SATURDAY NIGHT CLEAVER (2011).
★
No comments:
Post a Comment