‘Tis may be the season for romantic comedies set in idyllic English cottages or whimsical tales of elves lost in New York, but if you’re in the mood for something a little more gory, we’ve got your back.
We guide you through 14 days of Christmas Horror. Today we salute all the crappy, unwatchable and downright terrible films with a look at The Gingerbread Man.
So far in our series we have mostly looked at very decent films, all of which I like. It’s about time we shake things up a bit and put a proper stinker on this countdown.
As we all know, horror is a genre capable of producing iconic classics, some truly twisted masterpieces, but it’s a genre also ripe for some absolute dogshit. Of course, there are countless terrible Christmas horror films too, but we’re diving into the deep end with a look at one of the worst; The Gingerbread Man.
If you’re not familiar with the plot of The Gingerbread Man, we’re gonna go through it here. If you would like to be surprised by its insane twists and turns, we recommend you go watch the film and then return to read this as we will be revealing at least some of its secrets.
Still here? Great!
The Gingerbread Man is a slasher in which a serial killer (played by the reliably bad Gary Busey) is caught, sentenced to death and suitably cremated afterwards. His ashes are sent to his mother who just happens to be a witch. She mixes the ashes of her son with a gingerbread spice mix so when a bakery makes an unusually large, but nonetheless delicious gingerbread man, it comes alive and starts murdering people like there’s no tomorrow.
There’s no subtle way to say this; The Gingerbread Man is bad. Really bad. Hilariously bad. At times it makes The Room, the cult classic of bad movies, look like a sophisticated piece of entertainment. With shocking CGI and terrible acting, The Gingerbread Man was made to be watched with plenty of alcohol on hand to dull the pain of watching a film this bad.
So why would we watch it? At the end of the day, several people worked very hard on making the film and none of them supposedly had bad intentions. Perhaps we just love to hate-watch things. Netflix’s Emily In Paris is one of the most recent examples of this; we can’t stop watching it although we recognise it’s poorly made and written.
Credit: Full Moon Entertainment
There are some merits to this atrocious film. It has a classic slasher film structure and a relatively strong Final Girl. Sarah, played by Robin Sydney, has a personal connection to the killer; he spared Sarah and her mother Betty in a diner shoot-out while killing the rest of her family. Although she’s a lot more helpless than her sisters, Ripley from Alien, Sidney from Scream and Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street, there is still some empowerment found in Sarah’s confrontation with the killer.
The thrill of The Gingerbread Man comes not from frights or feeling scared, but from having a laugh, preferably with friends. Like a demented, bloodier version of Jack Frost, The Gingerbread Man is a classically bad movie, but that’s not always a bad thing.
