Day 04: Mad Jester Reviews...

ON THE FOURTH DAY OF CREEPMAS MY MONSTERS GIVE TO YOU:

Yup it's that time again folks, when I enlist the help of my crazy uncle Mad Jester to bring you guys some reviews of movies he's seen. He's like my very own uncle Fester, but he's still stuck in Canada. This time he was hitting the hard Egg Nog and in his drunken stooper he watched Gingerdead Man 1 and 2. Then he promptly proceeded to whimper and loose his lunch. Don't mix hard Egg Nog and bad horror.

But after he sobered up he sent me this review to share with you readers. It spares me having to watch it, and considering the list of stuff I have to do for Creepmas as is, I am grateful for the small break.

MAD JESTER REVIEWS GINGERDEAD MAN

Hello, spurts-fans, and welcome to Schlocky Night in Canada!

Lately, I've been spoiling myself by watching only GOOD horror movies- you know, the thought-provoking, or at least genuinely dread-inducing stuff. The stuff that you'd gladly admit to having watched on purpose, and not just because there's nothing on TV. But as any horror fan will tell you, there's another, more sinister side of horror cinema... the truly vile, nasty, cringe-worthy, laughably-executed dreck that most people with a sense of taste wouldn't touch with a ten-foot punji spike.

Well, I recently helped myself to a double-serving of the latter variety; partly because I rather enjoy looking down my nose at these cinematic stink-bombs, and partly because I felt guilty about... certain things, and felt some self-punishment was in order. (I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize again to the Burlington Fire Department and Mrs. Finley's grade 3 class.) And so, I began an expedition into the execrable, a foray into the foul and faulty; a double-helping of half-baked horrible, in the form of Gingerdead Man and Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust.

First, the first. Gingerdead Man 1 tells the (godawful and wildly contrived) tale of one Millard Findlemeyer (triple word score on THAT name), a mentally-unstable career criminal played by mentally-unstable Gary Busey. Long story short, he robs a diner (in broad daylight, no less), kills the father and brother of 'protagonist' Sarah Leigh (ye GODS!), gets turned in to the cops (when he decides not to kill Sarah because 'she was too scared to try to stop me'), and gets the chair.

Now comes the stupid part.

His mother, a 'witch', enchants his ashes and sends them, marked 'gingerbread seasoning', to the bakery where Sarah works with her mother and friends. The ashes, mixed with gingerbread dough, blood from a clumsy coworker (health code violation!), electricity from a faulty wire and enough suspension of disbelief to fill an Olympic standard swimming pool, and Findlemeyer is reincarnated as an animate, malevolent cookie calling itself (you guessed it) the Gingerdead Man. What follows is a campaign of terror that can only be described as 'brain-stabbingly idiotic'.

The villain, I must remind you, is a cookie- represented on-screen by a shoddy rubber hand-puppet (which kind of looks like a vaguely humanoid turd with a face), and the kills consist of 'shot of victim screaming, shot of puppet clumsily swinging weapon, shot of victim falling over covered in blood (strawberry syrup)'. The acting makes it look like they drove a pickup truck up to the front of Second City and honked the horn for itinerant actors. The music sounds like it was composed and performed by some Cheetos-stained CHUD in his mom's garage on a Casio keyboard while on a break between WoW raids. The dialogue? Oh gods, the dialogue.

The dialogue makes me want to beat William Butler and August White (the writers) about the face and neck with a copy of English How She Is Spoke.

Now for the second serving.

GDM2 is set on the lot of a movie studio, namely 'Cheatum Pictures'- a small-time movie house specializing in producing cheesy low-budget sci-fi and horror movies. (How meta!) The eponymous comestible shows up for no discernible reason to cause havoc, overhears that there's a 'book of Satanic spells' on the studio lot (Gingerdead himself declares "How wonderfully contrived!") and conceives a plan to return to a living human body. 

I was expecting Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust to be an even bigger poop-and-toenail sandwich than the first, but I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. Not that the acting was any better (it wasn't), nor that the plot was any less contrived (it was MORE), nor that the monster was any more terrifying (same crappy puppet, with a few more crappy puppets introduced). It's not that the music was better, or that the dialogue was any less cornball. But I must say, I actually kind of enjoyed GDM2, for one simple reason: 

They took a page out of the Troma Studios Book of Filmmaking, namely the page that reads as follows: 

Step 1:  Do you give a fuck? Well, KNOCK IT OFF! 

This time out, the cast and crew KNEW they were making a shitty movie, and just decided 'Fuck it, let's have fun!' They added silly sound effects, LOTS of stupid jokes and puns, and characters that may well have fit in on Tex Avery's drawing board. And then there's the puppets. 

For a good example of just how hilarious these puppets are, do a Google image search for 'haunted dildo'. If you see something that looks like a googly-eyed rubber penis in a tux, it's either the Haunted Dildo puppet, or a picture of Robert Pattinson on the red carpet. 

So, to summarize, Gingerdead Man 2: Passion of the Crust is a campy, goofy, fun outing, perfect for Bad Movie Night, while its predecessor Gingerdead Man will make you feel like your skull's been cornholed by a rhinoceros with foetal alcohol syndrome.