The first movie of the trilogy sharing the same name, The Gingerdead Man is a great example of a movie so bad it’s good. It’s full of cheesy puns, massive plot holes, and very cheesy effects — but it’s a very fun watch regardless. It is an R-rated movie released by Full Moon Features in November, 2005. Directed by Charles Band (the head of Full Moon Features) and written by William Butler and Domonic Muir, it stars actors such as Gary Busey, Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke and Alexia Aleman.
This movie has a ton of cheesy jokes in it. Most of the puns made are about pastries, which makes sense because this movie is about a killer cookie. This would be fine for a B Movie, but the puns combined with the Gingerdead Man’s one-liners that are also pastry themed makes them get old by the end of the movie. There are still some memorable ones, like when the spoiled rich kid character was calling her dad and telling him the Gingerdead Man is after her. She tells him, “Daddy, you have got to come and get me, I’m at Betty’s Bakery and we got homicidal baked goods after us,” (quote from IMDb). This joke specifically was good since the line delivery was funny, but not too many of the others stand out. It would have been better if the writers wrote jokes about a broader subject like cooking instead of specifically baked goods.
There are some major plot holes. The biggest one is how the Gingerdead Man was created in the movie. After the intro, the bakery receives a shipment of ingredients, including a box of magic gingerbread seasoning. It was not the brand they ordered and wasn’t delivered with the rest of the supplies, but they aren’t suspicious of this for some reason and brush it off. Later, while one of the bakers named Brick is making dough with the magic gingerbread seasoning, he accidentally cuts his hand and another character named Sarah bandages it up while holding it over the bowl, which leads to his blood dripping into the dough. Despite this being a clear food safety hazard, they don’t throw out the dough but continue to make it into a gingerbread man. Then, while the Gingerbread Man is baking, Lorna breaks into the kitchen to release rats. Sarah finds her and they throw things at each other until Sarah pushes Lorna into the fuse box and short circuits the power. However, this pumps the oven cooking the single gingerbread man full of electricity which makes the gingerbread man come to life as, of course, the Gingerdead Man. Way too much had to go wrong for him to come alive that it was almost comical to watch.
Another thing is that none of the people in the bakery can contact the outside world since all of the landlines were cut, but there are multiple scenes where they just leave the building; the first where the love interest, Amos, goes to his car to get his gun and the second where Lorna goes outside and finds a dead body. They could have fixed this to an extent by having a town-wide power outage or by making the Gingerdead Man lay traps at the exits, but the movie never addresses this when it clearly makes no sense.
Given that this film was published by Full Moon Features, a company known for their bad effects, it’s no surprise that all of the effects used in the movie are pretty bad. They definitely aren’t as trash as the effects in some other B Movies, but they are up there. It’s pretty clear that the Gingerdead Man puppet and hiring Gary Busey took up most of their budget from the start, since every background has little to no props or decorations in it. However, there has been no information regarding the movie’s budget released, so this is only speculation. The other issue is the fake blood, which becomes most relevant near the end of the movie. Most B Movies struggle with this, but the blood in this one specifically is way too saturated.
Even though the movie has many problems, it is still a fun watch. Very early into its runtime the movie breaks the viewer’s suspension of disbelief, which allows them to watch it without taking it seriously making the experience enjoyable. It’s an especially fun movie to watch with friends because of how goofy it is. It is still an R-rated movie though, so it does contain some adult content, which can be accredited to strong language, the murder scenes, and a few depictions of nudity (it’s only hinted at, no actual nudity is present). The Gingerdead Man can be found on streaming services like Vudu, Tubi, and Amazon Prime Video at no extra cost.
