In one of my all-time favorite films, Ghost World, there is an exchange between the two lead characters at the lame party celebrating their recent high school graduation that I think is an apt description of the two ways I tend to feel about low-budget horror:
“This is so bad, it’s almost good.”
“This is so bad, it’s gone all the way past good and back to bad again.”
Goofy, gory B-movie horror tends to fall into one of those two buckets. It is either so fantastically, over-the-top bad that it becomes almost good (or at least entertaining), or it goes so far that it passes that very fine line by and becomes just bad. Gingerclown, alas, is one of the latter. A shame, given that it boasts a cast that includes cult all-stars like Tim Curry and Brad Dourif, not to mention some of the most outrageous animatronic creatures I have seen in a movie since CGI took hold of Hollywood.
Gingerclown sends impossibly nerdy Sam (Ashley Lloyd) into an old, abandoned amusement park at the bidding of the bully Biff (Michael Cannell-Griffiths), with the promise that if Sam comes out with a trophy of some kind that he will be rewarded with a trophy of his own–Biff’s girlfriend Jenny (Erin Hayes). Jenny is so upset about this that she follows Sam into the amusement park to tell him not to bother with Biff’s stupid dare. Except, once the two of them are inside, they realize that the place is populated by a group of monstrous creatures led by the nefarious title character (Curry)–including Worm Creature (Dourif), Braineater (Lance Henriksen) and Nelly the Spiderwoman (Sean Young)–and it’s going to be much more difficult to get out alive than they had hoped. The bizarre monsters are the kind of campy animatronic creatures that one would expect in a movie from the 1980s–which is conveniently when Gingerclown takes place. My personal favorite is the snippy, sharp-toothed talking teakettle, though Nelly the Spiderwoman is her own special kind of Lewis Carroll-esque nightmare.
The creatures themselves are actually pretty great if you have an appreciation for old-school special effects. It’s a shame that all the dialogue they spout feels as though it were written by a hyperactive teenager–incredibly lame, constituted primarily of swear words and not at all funny. This lack of funniness is generally a bad thing when a film styles itself as a horror-comedy. One wonders if that is due to the fact that the film’s writer-director (and most of it’s crew) are Hungarian; perhaps the intended humor was woefully lost in translation. It doesn’t help that the live-action actors are terrible, while the voice actors, despite being talented people, are not nearly talented enough to make this stuff palatable. Gingerclown feels like a movie that was meant to be so outrageously bad that it would end of being a whole lot of fun; instead, it’s just bad.
