Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Produced and directed by Charles Band
• Written by Silvia St. Croix and “August White” (Domonic Muir)
• Starring
  • Gary Busey
  • Robin Sydney
  • Ryan Locke
  • Larry Cedar
  • Alexia Aleman

The path to the screen for The Gingerdead Man has been a long and arduous one. It’s a project that was originally announced at least four years ago as a black comedy to be written and directed by William “Madhouse” Butler, and got batted around on the tumultuous winds of fortune flowing from Charles Band’s various production entities during that span of time. But Band never let the idea go, and kept coming back to it until he finally was able to make his dream a reality:

A horror movie about a killer cookie.

And let’s just get this out of the way right off the bat: This is a dumb idea. A tremendously dumb idea. One might be able to suspend a teeny-tiny bit of disbelief over the standard-issue Full Moon killer dolls and puppets, but a cookie? Twelve inches of furious, hellbent baked dough? How menacing is an antagonist that could be thwarted by dunking in a glass of milk? I know that we’re supposed to be enticed by the gonzo craziness of the idea, but seriously. A cookie.

A cookie with the voice of Gary Busey, I should add. Busey’s life is beyond bizarre, really; a former notorious coke fiend who’s been Born Again, he still only gets villainous hard-ass roles that must really conflict with his self-image as a devoted Christian. Busey’s only screen time comes in the prologue: He plays Millard Findlemeyer, a generically twisted robber and serial killer with a “thing” about his mother; we meet him in the process of robbing a little Texas diner, where the Leigh family – Dad (Newell Alexander), brother Jeremy (James Snyder), and sister Sara (Robin Sydney) – ends up on the wrong end of his gun. Dad brings a knife to a gun fight and quickly buys it; Jeremy falls for the “Go ahead, grab the gun” schtick that they must teach in Hardened Criminal School; and Sara alone survives because Findlemeyer can’t decide whether to kill her or not.

“‘Whaaat a friend we have in Jeeesuus…’ Everybody sing!”

Fast-forward two years. Betty’s Bakery, the Leigh family business, has naturally fallen on hard times, with Dad and Jeremy dead. Mother Betty (Margaret Blye) has taken to hitting the bottle pretty bad, leaving Sara to run the establishment with the help of Julia and Brick (Daniela Melgoza and Jonathan Chase). To make matters even worse, there’s a new chain bakery coming in across the street any day now, threatening to knock Betty’s Bakery off the edge on which it’s already teetering.

Which is probably why Sara let Findlemeyer’s execution and subsequent cremation two days earlier pass without much notice. (Also because it’s a lot cheaper to have such things happen off-screen and cover them in off-hand exposition.) There’s certainly no reason for her to think that the box labeled “Grandma’s Gingerbread Seasoning” that shows up at the bakery’s back door is anything other than normal baking supplies.

Let’s see… cremation… special seasonings… I guess somebody heard the joke about Colonel Sanders becoming the twelfth secret herb, huh? It seems a particularly contrived way for Findlemeyer’s unseen mother to engineer his revenge, especially as it seems to require blood in among the “seasoning” ashes to make anything untoward happen. Fortunately, Brick manages to cut himself opening the package, and bleeds unnoticed into the big seasoning container. Cursed cookies or not, I really don’t want to eat anything from this establishment.

“I feel like standing around in abject terror. How about you two?”

Oh, let’s also establish two more characters: Jimmy Dean (Larry Cedar), the ever-so-Texan entrepreneur bringing the competing bakery in across the street, and his twenty-something snob daughter Lorna (Alexia Aleman). Jimmy wants to buy Betty’s Bakery out for a measly $50,000, just to demolish it and get it out of the way; Lorna, well, she just gets off on being bitchy.

So. Are we all established? Characters, motivations, settings, plot contrivances? Good. There’s twenty minutes of our feature gone. Now let’s get on with the nefarious doings in the world’s least likely bakery. I realize that most people don’t have much expertise in bakeries, but my dear wife used to work in one, so I had her help me list the unlikelihoods:

• Despite the fact that this entire movie takes place after closing time, bakers don’t usually work late into the night, they get up in the ungodly small hours of the morning, so that the day’s wares will be fresh.
• Why in the world does this mom-and-pop operation have at least four different mixing machines lined up against the wall? Granted, this does take place in Texas, so it might be the baker’s version of leaving junked cars on the lawn; my guess, however, is that the set was simply dressed with whatever used baker’s supplies could be rented for cheap.
• Cookie dough doesn’t look like bread dough, people.
• I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that most bakers aren’t going to use a huge batch of gingerbread dough to make a single gingerbread man, alone on a cookie sheet, to bake all by its lonesome.
• And the “oven.” (Snort.) It’s pretty obviously a walk-in freezer or refrigerator with a red light on inside. (Walk-in ovens? Only if bakers wear asbestos shoes.)

Wow. Every caption I can think of would get me kicked out of the League of Movie Reviewing Decency.

So. Sara burns the midnight oil alone, and having made the single gingerbread man that the plot requires, she’s distracted during the backing by Lorna, who sneaks in to release some rats, so she can have the place shut down. (Pity there were no witnesses to the bloody dough.) In the ensuing catfight, which ranges throughout the two main rooms of the bakery, they manage to bump into the fusebox, and suddenly the “oven” starts arcing electricity like a jacob’s ladder. Again, this is a positively Rube Goldbergian revenge scheme.

And the cookie in the oven is transformed into – a rubbery-looking foam latex puppet!

Note: Way back, when William Butler was trying to mount his version, there was a CGI test footage trailer done of a Gingerdead Man who looked more like an evil Pillsbury Doughboy. (I had thought I was going to be able to show the breadth of my incredible resources by showing off a clip from that footage; then Band included it in the making-of footage.) Supposedly, Band decided to go with the puppet in the produced version because it looked more like a real gingerbread man. Uh-huh. Yeah, I’m sure that the cost of doing it with CGI on a contemporary Full Moon budget had nothing whatever to do with that decision. Right.

And from here, we simply get standard-issue, bare-bones horror movie plotting. The cookie runs around making snide comments in Gary Busey’s voice. The characters, having seen it, do their darnedest to disbelieve it and act nonchalant. The cookie starts killing people around the periphery, even though it’s Sara he really wants dead (he even ventures outside to kill Lorna’s dad Jimmy when he comes to pick her up, despite the fact that Jimmy has absolutely nothing to do with anything – he’s just another obligatory body). Everyone tries to behave like the bakery has all sorts of places to run to, despite the fact that it’s essentially two rooms. Characters like Julia, Brick, and Sara’s mom and Lorna’s semi-decent boyfriend Amos (Ryan Locke) wander back onto the premises mostly so the Gingerdead Man will have more people to terrorize. And most annoyingly, people keep saying things like, “Let’s get out of here!” – and then not leaving. Look, it’s not like the bakery is somewhere in the middle of nowhere; there are cars going by on the downtown street out front at all hours of the night. Are these characters too stupid to find the exit signs? Well, they are being menaced by a cookie…

The old version…

…and the new version. Gee, what an improvement.

And that’s what I have to keep coming back to: It’s. A. Cookie. There’s an inherent creepiness to dolls coming to life (though heaven knows it’s been worked into the ground). But a cookie simply isn’t scary. It can’t be. It’s an immutable law: there’s no such thing as a scary cookie. Especially when it’s an obvious chunk of cable-controlled foam latex. Bizarrely, the making-of segment spends an awful lot of time on the full-sized Gingerdead Man costume that John Carl Buechler was working on when the footage was shot – a costume that never appears in the movie. No, we’re just left with a rubbery finger puppet.

And from the way the rest of the movie is constructed, we’re apparently supposed to by satisfied with that. We the audience are expected to be so won over by the “zany” premise that we won’t notice how threadbare every other facet of the movie is, from the paint-by-numbers plot, to the thin excuses for characterization (heck, these are even thin excuses for stereotypes), to the utterly predictable filler dialogue that tries (and fails) to stretch the idea out to feature length, to the maddeningly dull two rooms that encompass 95% of the movie… The movie’s only got one nickel to spend, and it’s a freaking cookie.

Hey, there is WAY too much food coloring in that frosting!

If there’s any good news to be found on the entire DVD, it’s that Band’s next two movies, Petrified and The Cutter’s Club, appear to contain no diminutive critters. One can only hope – nay, pray to whatever supernal powers one holds dear – that The Gingerdead Man represents the last dregs of Charles Band’s decades-long obsession with animated toys/dolls/whatnot. The well is dry. The vein is mined out. This poor excuse for a feature barely manages to limp to the 60-minute mark before the closing credits begin (a full ten minutes). Let’s just bury it where it collapsed, shall we?

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Larry Cedar (Jimmy Dean) played “Nydrom” in the DS9 episode “Armageddon Game,” “Tersa” in the Voyager episode “Alliances,” and “Tessic” in the Enterprise episode “Marauders”