Hansel & Gretel Get Baked

A Comedy/Horror Mash-up That Quickly Loses Its Way After A Surprisingly Clever Introduction
When approaching a movie entitled "Hansel & Gretel Get Baked," you aren't exactly shopping for next season's Oscar winner! At best, you hope for a good time. And I'll tell you what, I was so stoked and surprised by how enjoyable I found the start of this experience. The opening third of the movie expertly combines stoner humor, skewed fairy tale lore, and over-the-top horror comedy. The screenplay is unexpectedly clever (silly, too, but enjoyably so) and I thought this might be a terrific sleeper surprise. Unfortunately, though, this delicate balance of creativity soon gives way to much less inspired action mayhem. Within a few scenes, the film all but forgoes the fairy tale parallel and drops the delightful stoner angle. Instead it focuses on its most generic element and becomes a rather toothless horror trifle with a witch and her zombie minions battling the young protagonists. Even this might be sufficient if it was super funny or unusual, but it simply isn't. In short, a...

DON'T TOUCH MY GINGERBREAD HOUSE
The plot is simple. Agnes (Lara Flynn Boyle) is a witch who grows some righteous weed called "Black Forest" that all the kids crave. She allows them into her house and extracts their youth from them, which causes their demise.

The film starts out like a fairly decent stoner film, break out the milk and gingerbread cookies. It has some decent comedy, dark comedy, and slasher moments. About half way through the film the writers got a block.I kept waiting for Hansel (Michael Welch) and Gretel(Molly C. Quinn) to come together and turn this into a good witch fight. As it turns out Hansel is a minor character while Molly has to carry the film by herself. Don't get me wrong, she did well for the lousy lines she was scripted, with her red hair and looks making me ache for Laura Prepon. It was a good idea that was squandered.

Parental Guide: F-bombs. No sex or nudity. Not even a simple cat fight between Lara and Molly rolling around on the floor.

Uneven Horror/Comedy Has A Few Stylish Moments
With a title like HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED, what would you expect? Based solely on the title alone - itself clearly a play on words (methinks) about how in the original fable Hansel and Gretel nearly find themselves in an oven - I'm thinking ... comedy? No? Something certainly with drug undertones? No? Or maybe all director Duane Journey and screenwriter David Tillman intended was to delivered a contemporary twist on a parable as old as dirt. Whatever the case, you're likely to find yourself scratching your head as much as I did trying to figure it out when you give this a spin as their intent remains elusive.

(NOTE: The following review will contain minor spoilers necessary solely for the discussion of plot and characters. If you're the kind of reader who prefers a review entirely spoiler-free, then this is not it! Instead, I'd encourage you to skip down to the last three paragraphs for my final assessment. If, however, you're accepting of a few modest hints at...

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