Well…this was a trial to be sure…’Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong’ is arguably the 2nd worst ‘Gingerdead Man’ movie, and the worst ‘Evil Bong’ movie up to this point in my opinion. Neither of the titular villains get NEARLY enough screen time to do much of anything in this…what can ONLY be described as ‘Cash in’ event of the decade.

Seriously, the films an hour and 23 minutes long and 25 minutes of that consists of titles, credits and reshowing the best bits of ‘The Gingerdead Man’ and ‘Evil Bong'(s) 1-3. With at least 40 minutes of the remaining hour being utilised SOLELY for one of 3 things:

*Boobs
*Trying to sell you Evil Bong and Gingerdead Man Merch
*or cramming in as many references and cameos from the Gingerdead man and Evil Bong Franchises as is physically viable…whether it makes sense or not.

The ‘Plot’ picks up about 6 months after the events of ‘Evil Bong 3’ and a few years after the events of ‘The Gingerdead Man’ but it seemingly removes ‘Gingerdead’ 2 and 3 from the Canon…which is just…odd. considering they reuse puppets from ‘Gingerdead man 3’ in the 3rd act of this thing.

Anyway…Basically the plot follows Larnell, our tragic 90s Stoner now going solo with a shorter than average, high pitched, one eyed, rage machine of an assistant who stabs first and asks questions later. The pair have set up a new weed dispencery on the beach front and Business is…well, not great. largely because they dont really seemingly understand how businesses work.

It transpires that just up the street, the survivors of ‘Gingerdead man’ have set up a new bakery with the aim of having a fresh start. Unfortunately for both businesses, theres incoming disruption. As Gingerdead finds out about the new bakery and decides to head over to finish his murdering spree, and it’s revealed that Larnell has basically kept Ebee ‘The Evil Bong’ under lock and key in a back room of the weed shop with the aim of figuring out her ‘Secrets’.

When recurring regular screwball ‘Rabbit’ enters the shop eating a cookie, Larnell is totally smitten by it, and heads over to the bakery where he’s greeted by Sarah Lee. The pair awkwardly flirt for a moment until Larnell suggests a cross promotion effort. With the weed store sending customers there to deal with the munchies, and the bakery maybe making the store some edibles to sell.

Its all rather short lived however when Ebee manages to escape entrapment and kidnaps Rabbit. Gingerdead arrives at the bakery and spots Sarah Lee and Larnell and the pair end up…well I wont say ‘In a race against time’ but basically they get given something resembling a ‘To Do’ list which we follow them as they go through it…aaand…thats kind of the movie basically.

I genuinely dont know how you mess up a cross over like this…other than to say a lack of money almost certainly played a part. As was the case with ‘Evil Bong 3’ we have 2-3 set spaces, a days worth of outdoor shoot footage and the vast majority of the films styalisation is almost entirely dependent on post production colour correction and CGI…with almost no effort put into the ‘In Camera’ side of things.

The scripts non existent. This is honestly a 20 minute story thats been stretched out to an hour and 23 by way of LOOOOOOOONG and drawn out conversations about store management and selling techniques. Gingerdead and Bong only actually interact in the same scene for *approx* 3 minutes, with them being seperated for the rest of the movie. Theres no grand showdown with the pair, they argue a bit, but they dont fight, and the ending is about as boring as its possible to make a movie about a killer cookie and malicious Bong occupying the same space.

Theres barely any kills in this, and what kills there are are largely done off screen, the pacing is a crawl, The tone is similar to ‘Evil Bong 3’ in the sense that they’re pretty much aiming for an out and out comedy with heavy emphisis on it being the stupidest, lowest common denominator humour its possible to do (I didnt laugh) But without the familiarity of the core cast barring Larnell and Rabbit you’re just left with a situation where the new characters are ‘Scrappy doo’ing’ their way through the script, and any of the GIngerdead folks are totally lost because they’ve been pulled out of a *largely* straight horror franchise (ignoring 2 and 3 as this film does) and told to play it for laughs…Imagine if Hellraiser crossed over with ‘Childs Play’ and they asked Pinhead to ‘play it daft.’ Thats what they’ve done here.

Its a bad story, padded to the Nth degree, with bad jokes, bad pacing, a boring resolution, poor character development and absolutely no enthusiasm in trying to get you invested in the movie…They start trying to upsell people on Resin statues of Ebee and ashtrays from the ‘Full Moon’ store in the 2nd act of this thing…and they try to do it with a straight face for christs sake.

The direction and cine is probably the films saving grace. There are moments in this where it actually looks quite filmic. The illusions utterly destroyed the second ‘Bong’ or ‘Gingerdead appear on screen (both have had a redesign for this movie, with Gingerdead having some kind of deeply unpleasent ‘Clutch Cargo’ style real mouth overlayed onto the puppet, while Ebee gets weird ‘GI Joe’ action Eagle panic eyes that rock left to right aggressively.

But outside of the redesigns, the film actually doesnt look half bad, we have some experimentaion with shot composition. They FINALLY remember to get some decent B-roll to help make sequences look a bit more interesting. and the cast seem to know whats going on and give performances worthy of the script (make of that what you will) I wish they used the set space a little bit more honestly…but at this point I’ll take ‘just above the basics’ as a decent starting point. Dont get me wrong, the sets still look INSANELY cheap…but they at least TRY to make them not look like that.

The performances are farily dire if im being blunt. John Patrick Jordan, Since ‘Evil Bong 2’ has pretty much been the best part of these movies. giving a performance that basically comes across as a stoned interpretation of ‘Randall’ from Clerks. Here? it’s much the same, and he’s easily the best part of this movie. Robin Sydney as Sarah Leigh just about manages to give a solid ‘straight woman’ performance to Jordans easygoing and dry weed salesperson. But beyond that, it’s just adult models who’s only note was ‘Get naked and look sexy’ or they just got random bit part actors into the shoot and told them to ‘do weird stuff’ to help fill time. To my memory, the scene in which an Asian couple enter the store, improv a load of physical comedy while speaking in border racist tones, do a couple of routines and then leave…having NO involvement in the rest of the film other than that scene. Was pretty much the template for how the rest of the movie runs. It was just a really poor watch.

But the cherry on the cake HAS to be the soundtrack…which is a hybrid of 1 or 2 Evil Bong tracks…*sigh* and old Full Moon tracks. with the title track being the only new composition I picked out.

I would have rated this thing half a star higher had they not had the utter AUDACITY to try and sell me stuff half way into this thing. Hell, had they done that and that was the beginning and end of it. I’d have probably still shown it *some* mercy. But the Bluray release of this contains TEN MINUTES of adverts for ‘Evil Bong’ and Gingerdead merch alongside a podcast where they try to hock merch too…its just very clear that this movies sole purpose was to upsell the audience on a new line of merch, and they used…what could have been a…well I wont say ‘great’, but at LEAST maybe ‘Fun’ little cross over outing to milk EVERY. SINGLE. OUNCE of goodwill that I had. The thing has a couple of okay moments in it. But its absolutely not an essential watch and I was quite dissapointed.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/gingerdead-man-vs-evil-bong/