TURD ALERT!

At a scant hour's length, The Gingerdead Man (2005) delivers as little as it possibly can.

One can almost envision the drunken party at which the "creative" team thought this idea up, laughing their asses off.

But their level of creativity was not sufficient to take it further than what might be shown on the dvd box. The entire film is that one picture. And good though the drunken jest might've been, it did not result in a movie of any merit.

Full Moon productions are all too often just this empty & predictable. The company has come up with some of the spiffiest ideas for modern low-budget monsters, many of them ready-made to be sold as toys. But they value writers so little that they have rarely hired anyone who might actually have a good story to attach to these ideas. And you can get away with bad acting & goofy FX a lot more easily than you can get away with no story worth telling.

The drunken idea that launched this turd from Full Moon's ass is simply this: Serial killer gets electric chair, then is cremated so that his mom can mix his ashes with the fixin's for a gingerbread cookie. While said cookie is being baked, lightning strikes the oven, & brings the creepy little shit to life.

This is in fact a pretty good idea for a laughable film, but since so little imagination went into giving that idea a screen existence, the only laughing done will be the producers, all the way to the bank.


Gary Busey does a fine enough job in the opening sequence as the psycho thief who kills people for no more than a greasy spoon's morning take.

Alas, he's too soon gone from the film, except as the voice of the Gingerdead Man. Alas also, Gary seems to have believed he needed to do the voice cartoonily, so his job pales alongside that of Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky.

In lame imitation of Freddy of the Elm Street series, the gingerdead man makes a wise-ass pun each time he hurts someone. Beyond that, Child's Play (1988) & the rest of the Chucky movies seem to be the primary influence on The Gingerdead Man.

It does also fit tidily into Full Moon's toy-oriented childish horror projects. There are wonderful toys for the Puppet Master series, the dolls from Doll Graveyard (2005) with Puppets vs Dolls for good measure, not to mention Dollman vs. the Demonic Toys (1993). I'm afraid Full Moon may be investing more in plastic than in filmstock.

Some of these films are better than others, Dollman (1991) & the first Puppet Master (1989) movie might even qualify as pretty good.

But the longer Full Moon does this sort of film, the worse they get at it, the more convinced they seem to be that a new toy design is good enough, not requiring the stories to be well told nor the films well made nor even feature length.

What these films have all in common is holy terrors one foot tall, in films too often badly made even for shlock, whether or not the ideas were worthwhile & might have gone for better use.

By the time the studio got round to a foot-tall cookie monster, they seem really to have forgotten that a psycho one foot tall would be too easily overpowered, & write nothing into the story to explain why nobody just steps on the little bastard reducing him to crumbs. I mean, the eventual gag is that he can be eaten, so how is it he menaced anyone to begin with?


The script has no desire to be internally logical. The story takes place inner city rather than in the isolated cabin by the lake, so when the characters start getting picked off, there's far less rationality to nobody leaving.

At one point the "excuse" for not leaving is that the Gingerdead Man has swiftly & very improbably boobytrapped the exits, but we only ever see one boobytrap, & a new character arrives without setting such a trap off, & later everyone does leave the bakery without having to disarm any alleged boobytraps.

So one philosophy at Full Moon seems to be that if it is a stupid fantasy that couldn't happen anyway, it might as well not make any fucking sense whatsoever.

Full Moon seems also to think of horror fandom as the land of the geeky morons who, if told a dog dooky is a candybar, will eat it & say yum. And since I for one do keep watching their products with deep disappointment, they may not be far wrong in their demeaning assumptions about what we'll settle for.

The studio just loves to toss off a stinker of a "feature" no longer than an episode of X Files convinced you & I are dumb enough to buy it. The company has done some nice little cheapies over time, but the percentage of winners has never been great, & that small percentage is growing ever smaller.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl