Full Moon Entertainment, 2005
starring: Robin Sydney, Ryan Locke, Larry Cedar and Gary Busey
directed by: Charles Band

the plot: During a crime spree, psychotic criminal Millard Findlemeyer (Busey) massacres a diner full of people—except for young Sarah Leigh (Sydney), who watches helplessly as Findlemeyer kills her father and brother. Sarah escapes Findlemeyer’s wrath, and it’s her testimony that sends the killer to the electric chair. Sarah tries to put her life back together—she takes over the family’s busy bakery and tries to keep the business running, even as rival baker Jimmy Dean (Cedar) threatens to open a “bakery and world café” right across the street. Everything’s going well until Sarah receives a mysterious package of gingerbread seasoning. She bakes it into an unreasonably large gingerbread man and, thanks to a confluence of bizarre events, the cookie is animated with the spirit of Findlemeyer. Determined to get revenge on Sarah, Findlemeyer, now in cookie form, wreaks havoc in the bakery, and no one, not even Amos (Locke), the town delinquent and Sarah’s secret crush, can stand in the way of the pissed-off pastry.

why it’s good: Any movie about a killer cookie is destined for awfulness and “The Gingerdead Man” fulfills just about every prediction you could make about how much it sucks. It’s not just that “The Gingerdead Man” is bad. It’s uninspired and boring and without the sort of campy spirit that’s required for any sort of film about murderous baked goods. The dialogue alone is enough to tip you off. When confronted by a rat in the bakery, the Gingerdead Man (voiced by Busey and with a face that looks sort of like a constipated raisin) screams, “Hey you little shit, fuck off!” There should be cookie puns a-flying here, but Charles Band and writer August White seemed to have tried pretty hard to make “Gingerdead” as unfunny and uninteresting as possible. The premise alone demands at least some accidental cleverness, but Band and his cohorts methodically and carefully stripped anything remotely good out of the movie. Even Gary Busey, who went from just being a punch-line to an actor whose career is based on being a punch-line, looks utterly confused about what’s going on. (He displays similar confusion in the making-of feature packaged with the movie.) Confusion is the prevailing mood in “Gingerdead,” though, and all the characters stumble about, adopting random emotions and spouting contradictory lines. Sarah and Amos rush off, panicked, to restart the bakery’s generator only to stop and reminisce for 10 minutes about some childhood memory. When the Gingerdead Man first appears, everyone agrees leaving the bakery is the best idea, until they suddenly all agree that staying inside is the safest bet. Then again, Sarah and the rest all unquestioningly accept that the soul of a dead killer can animate an extra-large gingerbread cookie, so it’s no wonder their reasoning skills are a bit wonky. Even at a lean 70 minutes, “Gingerdead” is almost too long to tolerate, and it takes an act of faith to accept how truly terrible it is.

why you should own this: You shouldn’t. Avoid “The Gingerdead Man” at all costs.