This is less of a movie review and more of a tragic account of a horrible thing that happened to me last night.

Bear witness to my sorrow.

DISCLAIMER:

There will be spoilers in this quasi-review.

DISCLAIMER # 2:

Don’t watch this movie.

SUMMARY VIA NETFLIX BECAUSE I CAN’T EVEN MAKE THIS SHIT UP:

After cleverly escaping the maximum security research institute of Homicidal Baked Goods, the Gingerdead Man stumbles upon a time machine and finds himself sent back in time as he slaughters the contestants of a 1970’s Roller Boogie contest.

NOTES:

1. This is how I ended up watching Gingerdead Man 3. (Without having ever seen Gingerdead Man or Gingerdead Man 2.)

Wednesday Night is Game Night. (Or Craft Night or Movie Night or whatever my friends and I end up doing.) Norah suggested a card game with a movie playing in the background, something silly that wouldn’t require a lot of focus. Now, I’m not usually a big fan of the background movie — I prefer music for my ambient noise — because it’s hard for me not to try and follow along with the plot of a film, even a silly one. Still, I figured a stupid Netflix horror movie would be okay, and when we read the plot description above . . . well, it was so WTF that we had to try it.

Quickly, however, it became apparent that this was the kind of movie that was so bad it wasn’t even funny, just painful. Yet despite my fervent hope that we would stop this madness and put on anything else, we kept watching the damn thing. Worse, the card game quickly petered out, leaving me with nothing to do but stare at the movie in horror.  I even took the deck of cards to play a game of solitaire, just to give myself something else to focus on, and within ten minutes?

I won. I won on my first try. It’s like God wanted me to watch this movie.

I don’t know how I pissed him off so badly, but clearly, I have to make some amends post-haste.

2. To protect my sanity, I decided to think of myself as an (extremely bad) photojournalist, documenting the reactions my friends were having to this film as they watched it. At first, we begin with Norah’s mild disbelief.

Then Dave and Kaci laugh at my coping mechanisms.

Then we see the Gingerdead Man for the first time . . . in a sad, sad parody of Silence of the Lambs.

Immediately afterwards?

Also?

By the time Lindsey arrived after work, the Gingerdead Man had escaped the Institute of Homicidal Baked Goods and had traveled back in time to a disco parody. (Also, a parody of Carrie. I don’t know.) I felt I owed her an apology, so I told her I was sorry she had come. I also took an extremely blurry photo of her reaction to the film.

Finally, it was hard to document my own instinct to clutch my big sister’s arm and have her protect me, so instead here is my “WTF Am I Watching Face?”

It just kept getting worse and worse.

3. So, if you want to hear more about the movie itself and not just our general reactions . . . all right, let’s talk about the creepy pedophilia angle.

Okay, it may not have actually been pedophilia, but our heroine, Cherry, looks about twelve when she’s introduced. When we see her closer up and with makeup . . . I don’t know, sixteen? Frustratingly, it’s harder to find the ages for lesser known actors online. Anyway, I have a hard time believing she could be anything older than 18, but the guy she’s matched up with is, I don’t know, mid-thirties maybe, and there are all kinds of other older men around leering at her. It’s squicky.

4. Also in this movie:

a. Coked-out dwarf DJ.
b. A threesome with a creepy janitor and two hallucinating teenagers.
c. A woman who hates roller skating because she was once so proficient at it that she caused the attack on Pearl Harbor.
d. Everybody brought back to life by time traveling children named Pickles and Tina.
e. A gingerbread dick being bit off through a glory hole. It is promptly eaten.

Yes. You read all of those things correctly.

5. I’ve mentioned this before, I’m sure, but I’m not great with faces, and until I’ve seen someone a few (or twenty) times, my brain tends to replace their faces with people I’ve seen before — usually actors from other movies. So I now remember this film having starred Mia Wasikowska as our telekinetic heroine and Kristen Bell as the total bitch. This amuses me greatly.

6. Finally, I will only give this movie marks for one thing: originality. Pickles and Tina, those pesky time-travelling children, are missing for most of the movie. When they come back, they bring a team of heroes with them to kick the Gingerdead Man’s ass and save the day. The team?

Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, and Lizzie Borden.

Yup. Hitler saves the day. It’s . . . well, it’s different.

Of course, I would never have gotten  anywhere near this point if I had been in charge of the remote control.

CONCLUSIONS:

For Christ’s sake.

MVP:

No one.

LVP:

William Butler (writer and director)

TENTATIVE GRADE:

F

MORAL:

Time travel fixes everything. More importantly, it’s sometimes necessary to wrestle the remote control out of your friend’s hands. If only I had a time travel machine myself to go back and fix the error. . .