The Gingerdead Man is classic Charles Band -- a bad, completely ridiculous, abnormally short film (the film itself runs just over an hour) that somehow manages to be entertaining. The Charles Band recipe of filmmaking rarely produces a product that tastes delicious, yet it's good enough to keep many of us just keep coming back for more.

Admittedly, The Gingerdead Man is pretty ridiculous, even for Band. So, yeah, I can believe that the grieving mother of executed killer Millard Findlemeyer sent his ashes in the form of gingerbread spice to the pretty young baker that testified against him, but there's no way she could have even fantasized that someone would drip blood in the batter, actually bake it up with the blood, and time it so that a freak electrical incident would supply the necessary juice to actually imbue Millard's murderous spirit into the baked product. Of course, watching any Charles Band movie requires you to accept the impossible -- it's all in the name of camp.

Millard Findlemeyer (Gary Busey) isn't the smartest of criminals. First, he decides to rob some dive with about four customers in it, then he hangs around to taunt, kill and injure the diners until the cops show up. For some reason, though, he decides not to kill young Sarah Leigh (Robin Sydney) after offing her father and brother, so she's able to guarantee him a trip to the electric chair two years later.

Now Sarah is struggling to run the family bakery. A city slicker competitor and his mega-spoiled daughter Lorna (Alexia Aleman) are trying to run her out of business. That's the least of her problems, though, when she lets one of her workers hold his bleeding arm over a bowl of batter, which said worker then goes ahead and bakes. The next thing you know, a foulmouthed little gingerbread man is running around chopping off fingers, cold-cocking people in the head and inventing some new baked goods of his own. Trapped inside the bakery (only because they think it's safer to stay inside than to leave, despite the fact that they know the killer is in the bakery), Sarah, Amber and misunderstood bad boy Amos (Ryan Locke) must find a way to stop Findlemeyer's tasty little mini-me before he kills them.

Busey is great as Findlemeyer and the voice of the Gingerdead Man, delivering even the cheesiest of one-liners with gleeful hostility. I loved Sydney as well, and not just because she's extremely easy on the eyes. All of the characters are pretty much stereotypes -- the misunderstood bad boy, the narcissistic beauty (and drama) queen, the baker with aspirations of wrestling glory -- but that's fine. A film about a killer gingerbread man doesn't really call for any deep character development. This is just a fun little farce of a horror movie, and it makes for an hour of great B-movie entertainment.

Charles Band cooked up something good with this one.