Ending fairy tale week, I decided to go out on the dumbest thing I could find since that’s how it started. The original Gingerdead Man starred Gary Busey.  This one did not and I don’t think even his magical healing powers could save this movie.  The advertised plot of the movie is that the Gingerdead Man travels back in time to 1976 and goes on a killing spree in a roller disco.  The actual plot of the movie is a roller disco themed parody of Carrie with random times when it will cut to a puppet that swears and then kills a person.

The movie starts with an almost clever parody of the Silence of the Lambs where agent Clarissa Darling (ha, two puns with Clarice Starling and Clarissa Darling from Clarissa Explains it All) goes to see the Gingerdead Man in an evil confections asylum or something.  Confused animal rights activists then break in and set all the insane baked goods free.  The GDM then finds a room where they are testing a time travel device for food (which is in this prison for some reason) and then jumps back to 1976.  That is where the movie stops being about him and starts being about Cherry, the Carrie stand-in. The whole movie plays out like someone tried to make a Mad Magazine movie parody into a feature length film but didn’t bother fleshing anything out.

This movie is basically a bullshit shotgun that just buckshots any and every stupid idea across the screen. Scenes will jump randomly between 3 different things happening making there be absolutely no flow to the movie.  Also it doesn’t really give a shit about anything it has established.  Two kids find the time travel remote and end up getting sucked through time even though it was originally said to be something that only worked on food.  But whatever.  For a movie that has a run time of about an hour and 10 minutes, there is a metric shit-ton of filler.  Every fourth line will be broken up by shots of people roller skating making any scene this stuttered mess of unfinished thoughts.

GDM doesn’t really interact with the main plot of the movie at all until the end and basically only kills someone when they have also removed themselves from the main plot.  In this way, the Gingerdead Man is actually an audience stand-in.  His voyeuristic view of the characters mimics the way we see them and his disgust mirrors our own views of the B-movie.  When he kills, he does so only after a scene has been dragged on far too long and so becomes the frustration of the movie goer given essence that is able to move the plot along by “cutting” scenes like a metaphorical editor. The scattershot nature of the framing is a commentary how movie makers assume a low attention span of the modern audience and yet the Gingerdead Man will wait and watch long after the scene has worn out its welcome.  Also, everything I just said is bullshit and so is this movie.

The only thing to make me think this movie was even slightly self-aware is the ending has the two kids come back through time and Bill & Ted up the place where they say they went back and warned everyone so nobody died.  That’s right.  The happy ending is that “None of this ever happened.” Oh if only two time traveling kids had warned me so I had never watched this as well.  This movie gets a 1 out of 5 and may god have mercy on its soul.