The Gingerdead Man (2005) If you are like Graveyard Frank and Cherries Gordon, you got all your Christmas shopping done by October 29th. This, of course, was the last day for the 42nd Annual Fall Rodeo and Art Show at the Angola State Prison in West Feliciana parish, LA. It is billed as the “Wildest Show in the South!” Frank has been to a rodeo or two, but while certainly not an expert, does admit that the convict-bronc busters do seem to get a bit more busted up than your average cowboy. Normally, Cherries would be upset at the treatment of the animals, but as the EMTs roar up ringside for the third time, now carting a statutory rapist with a busted collarbone off the field of battle, she has to confess some sympathy for the riders as well. She guesses, and Frank agrees, that these guys get little practice before participating. They probably just jump at a chance to get out into the fall air and semi-public. Even more heartbreaking is the Arts and crafts show. Here, you get to mingle with the prisoners themselves. They try to sell you pirogues made from matchsticks or wooden clocks featuring Fat Albert or Biggie Smalls or wind chimes made from flattened mess hall silverware. And the selling point is not the quality of the goods but the stories about the big house you get from the talking with the artisan. If you agree to buy, you take your new-found treasure and a ticket from the convict. They hit you up at the gate leaving and put the money into the proper prisoners account. If you manage to get all the way through to the end of the craft show, you come to a cul-de-sac featuring the crafts of all those cons who are too dangerous to let out to mingle. They occasionally have other, safer cons as envoys inside, but mostly they are fenced in around the cul-de-sac, yelling “You break it you buy it, be-atch!”, “I saw you lookin’, cracker!” or “Buy a clock, nigga, 35-bones!” At this point, most visitors quickly, politely make their rounds through the several tables within the cul-de-sac and head for the exit. Here, one tends to forget who is on which side of the pen, This is still not the most-exasperating part for Cherries this year; after loosing sight of her amid a flock of pelican-shaped suncatchers, Frank finds her talking to a prisoner-painter Albert Dubois. Dubois was convicted of armed robbery of a gas station in Opelousas back in 1963. He was 18 at the time. This childish mistake had netted him $56, the house-take for that evening, and 43 years in jail. He had been denied parole, as is typical in the deep south, several times. The criminal justice system here is often made up as it goes along. Frank could cite plenty of examples of this; he himself was once delivered a warrant at 4AM at gunpoint, for a broken headlamp violation he had paid weeks prior. A favorite anecdote was about his sometimes nemesis Tracy Scott (aka “Spike”), who was caught in his Tahoe in the Lafayette Zip, lazily huffing some crack cocaine sometime after midnight. The accosting officer, noting that Spike was already waiting arraignment on charges of intent to distribute a schedule 3, tossed the pipe over his shoulder, saying simply: “You’re lucky I don’t think prison is a place for white folks.” However, in the case of Millard Findlemeyer, even extreme Texas justice couldn’t keep that tough cookie down. We are talking, of course, of one of the latest Charles Band (Full Moon Pictures) atrocities entitled The Gingerdead Man, and featuring one-time academy-award nominated Gary Busey (The Buddy Holly Story; Rash 1978) as the evil pastry in question. This obscure little mess came out in November 2005, but on the “premium” channels in the finer West Feliciana motels, this is a first run feature, perfect for the holidays. Some movies are so bad they are good. The Gingerdead Man is so bad it has surpassed good and come right back ‘round as bad again. If this is any illustration of it, Cherries had about 50 better baking-related puns while watching than the film itself offered. The writer was obviously stuck, he went for a Pillsbury reference at least twice (Cherries, only once; she also noted a lack of a “cookie monster” gag.). Poor Gary Busey had obviously donated no more than 5 minutes of his time to the piece, he appears as Findlemeyer in the first scene, robbing and killing in a bakery (?). It is a toss up between what is harder to watch, the cheap, flat digital image, or Busey’s muddled, possibly improvised dialogue. After some impossibly long credits we are informed via some V. O. that Findelmeyer has been executed and cremated. After one of the baker’s cuts his hand over the gingerbread dough, Findlemeyer comes back to life as a cookie. Somehow the bakery crew even recognize him in cookie-form. It would be impossible or at least dreadful to do a laundry list of the flaws in both plot and technical ability in this film. Why are the close-ups of the beater different beaters on different speeds? Why is a bakery making one gingerbread man at a time? Why and how does anyone have a WALK-IN OVEN? Isn’t this dangerous, especially when you make one cookie at a time? How can those locked inside the hot oven not be burned by the door, walls, floors, etc? Why does the cookie have a revolver that shoot 15-30 times without re-loading? How does Findlemeyer get into the cookie and why doesn’t it look like the cookie put into the oven? Why does the cookie get its head bitten off and how does it reappear? Why is anyone afraid of a walking/talking cookie? Why doesn’t anyone just leave the bakery if they are? This is just a sample of a long list of questions, Frank noted upon viewing. He got tired of writing after several pages or would have many, many more. This is the tip of a sewage-y iceberg. In short, the best thing on the DVD-itself, is the ad for Charles Band’s line of Puppet Master figurines which have some kitschy appeal.

But the film does cheer Cherries up after speaking to Albert Dubois. Dubois had been in lockup for so long that he had begun mourning his forfeited life some time ago. He had instead begun to invent a family for himself, and through tireless mental workings, had breathed life into them. He could see his imagined wife in his head, and their children, two boys and a girl, they had been born, grown up and even moved on to college while he and his wife only grew older and fonder of each other in Albert’s daydreams. Dubois had taught himself to oil paint over the years and eventually began to illustrate his imagined life. And it was these he was selling at the craft show. How amazing and tragic to be able to purchase the only evidence of one’s beloved family. Frank and Cherries paid a slim $65 bucks for a painting of Dubois and his “wife” dancing arm-in-arm before a modest Christmas tree. The clothes are dated; floral prints for her and powder blue bells for him. The kids look on, the boys embarrassed of their parent’s intimacy, while Susheila, the girl, is pleased to see her father so gallant, her mom so radiant. For Dubois, the canvas is a memory of Christmas Eve for which no Polaroid or 8 mm existed. A Christmas Eve spent in his head, shivering in a cold bunk in Angola State back in 1975. Thinking back now at Christmas, Albert's family were so perfect and enviable in their way. So much untainted love, maybe the only perfect kind attainable: imaginary, that is. After all, after the holidays, Cherries would be back in Lafayette soon enough, taking the ballerina jewelry box Frank had gotten her this year back to her niche of cherished nick-knacks and baubles. Hopefully, a warm Christmas memory for her after another trying year. And Frank? Well, he’d be on the road somewhere come New Years. He had to see a man about a horse. Someplace.

(Or perhaps, Frank himself was lying, shivering somewhere this Xmas imagining Cherries Gordon into existence. Surely there was no physical evidence of someone so fetching in his real life!)