You may be wondering, “why in the world would you ever want to watch a movie that looks like that?!” Well, the answer is, I didn’t – Miles spotted the cover in a Blockbuster one night, sans the videotape, and has been obsessed ever since. He finally found the DVD to rent last week and movie night at the Powells’ had been set ever since.
Mind you, we watched this movie after our jaunt to the Getty and eating dinner in Santa Monica. But this movie was so horrifically bad, it deserved its own post.
OK, first off, Miles kept thinking the movie was “The Gingerbread Man.” Nope. When the title flashed, Trinity read aloud, “The Gingerdead Man.” Miles was shocked. He’d been googling the thing and almost considered just buying the damn thing, and he only found out it was the “The Gingerdead Man” tonight. Man.
It’s hard to say exactly what was so bad about this movie. I mean, in general, it was just overall bad. The acting was bad, the dialogue was bad, and the plot was bad. What was the plot, you ask? Well, let me tell you.
Gary Busey plays a killer who is sentenced to die and is killed by electrical chair. The girl he left alive – Sarah Leigh (get it?) – helped send him there. A couple of days after his execution, someone (in a black cape, during the day) drops off a stray box of gingerbread spice mix at Sarah’s bakery back door. Sarah and one of her employees, Brick Fields (get it?), are talking, are talking, when Brick accidently cuts himself and holds the bleeding cut (which was first on the hand, then inexplicably on his arm) over the stray, open gingerbread spice mix. (This was never spelled out, but apparently, his mother is a witch and sprinkled her son’s cremated remains into the gingerbread spice mix for revenge. How she knew blood would be dripped into the mix, I’m not sure.) Soon, the gingerbread spice, blood and all, is being mixed up with dough and being made into a gingerbread man, then all hell breaks loose. Nasty-looking gingerbread man goes nuts on the little bakery, cutting off Sarah’s mom’s finger after yelling, “ever tried a ladyfinger?”; using a rolling pin to run a rival bakery owner into a wall, and rigging a booby trap for the rival bakery owner’s daughter, Lorna Dean (get it?), who gets a knife in the forehead somehow.
Oh, the one-liners were priceless, too, like the ladyfingers one. Lorna Dean, at one point, tells Sarah, “shut your pie hole.” Get it? And (warning: spoiler coming!) after successfully, and bloodily, chewing off the Gingerdead Man’s head off, Brick sits back, mouth all bloody, burps, and says, “Got milk?”
Crikey.
But don’t take my word for it. Go rent it for yourself and watch it in all its horrible, campy glory. But good luck on finding a copy – for some reason, it took Miles about two months to find the thing because it kept getting rented.