Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked Blu-ray Movie Review

Half baked is more like it.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 15, 2013

Zeitgeist alert: we may be nearing the end of the recent glut of fairy tale reboots, often with a post-modernist edge, a trend that has infected (for want of a better term) both television and film over the past few years. Once Upon a Time and Grimm continue to trundle along fairly successfully on broadcast television, but one has to wonder whether the bloom has left the rose (poisoned or otherwise) on the silver screen. Outings like Red Riding Hood and Snow White and the Huntsman were met with at best middling critical response and less than hoped for revenues at the box office (Snow White and the Huntsman actually raked in some considerable dough, but it had been incredibly expensive to produce and market). But the past year has been pretty terrible for fairy tale characters thrust into “new and improved” settings. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters 3D and especially Jack the Giant Slayer 3D weren’t just critically pilloried, they were downright derided. Ironically, the former received by far the worse reviews, but still managed to show a sizable profit since the filmmakers had the good sense to keep production costs relatively low. The latter, on the other hand, bore the imprimatur of Bryan Singer and found some resonance in certain critical circles, but bombed so badly the trade papers are rife with reports with how much Warner is going to have to write off once everything is said and done. And so into this roiling fray comes Hansel & Gretel Get Baked, a genre mash-up that, much like the aforementioned Hansel & Gretel reboot, attempts to thrust these famous characters into a horror setting.

One of the decidedly ironic things about Hansel & Gretel Get Baked, which is a kind of bargain basement affair (albeit with certain flourishes), is that one of its many producers is associated with a pretty high profile franchise that deals with folklore, if not fairy tales, namely The Twilight Saga. And at least this film isn’t an overheated potboiler with a stuttering heroine and two equally unlikely heroes (sorry, folks, I’m a member of neither Team Edward nor Team Jacob). But Hansel & Gretel Get Baked seems to want to be a stoner comedy—after all, marijuana is a focal element of this outing—while at the same time being a kind of gross out horror film, courtesy of all sorts of blood and guts spilling out across the screen. It’s an unsavory casserole at best.

The conceit of Hansel & Gretel Get Baked is that there’s a little old lady in Pasadena named Agnes who just happens to also be a witch (played by Lara Flynn Boyle under pounds of latex that only partially hides her botched plastic surgery) who has developed some killer weed called Black Forest. Gretel (Molly Quinn) and her boyfriend Ashton (Andrew James Allen) are seen definitely inhaling as the film opens, but they soon discover they’ve run out of the precious bud. Ashton sets off in search of the little old lady, while Gretel bakes gingerbread cookies while her brother Hansel (Michael Welch) quizzes her about what she sees in Ashton.

Ashton of course has no clue what he’s in for, but Agnes soon makes it abundantly clear. He’s drugged (as in pacified), tied up and then basted as Agnes, as the film develops, continues to chop him to bits to create her own little treats. Ultimately she seen sucking the lifeforce from the young man, something that allows her to appear ever more youthful. (Without being overly snide, Boyle’s appearance has devolved so much due to her penchant for going under the knife that she’s actually scarier looking when she isn’t wearing the old age makeup.)

In the meantime, Gretel (and ultimately Hansel, too) set off in search of Ashton, as well as others who have disappeared. And some nasty types show up at Agnes’ door, hoping to scare the old lady (who is no longer that old) out of her stash. Hansel & Gretel is a fairly inconsistent balancing act between whimsy and gore, and in fact some of the film’s biggest laughs come from the overly violent deaths some characters experience. There are modernized references to the original fairy tale abounding throughout this enterprise, but they often seem like, well, candies shellacked to an aging gingerbread house. This bake job could have used a little more time in the oven.

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of New Video Group and Tribeca Film with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. This is another film shot on the Red system, and it has a rather sleek, nicely detailed look. Colors are accurate appearing and are very nicely saturated. Several sequences have been aggressively color graded in a sort of cobalt blue, and those segments have some diminishment of fine detail. I personally found contrast to be just a little lacking in these sequences as well, but others may actually like the lack of variation in tone in what are supposed to be spooky moments. There's some minimal CGI here (some music "comes to life" after Gretel and Ashton get stoned) as well some funny practical effects (mostly to do with various limbs getting sliced off), and those look fine. Shadow detail is excellent in the more normally color graded scenes, but to my personal taste could have been boosted a bit in the blue sequences.

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked features both a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track. Both of these mixes provide excellent fidelity, but the surround track has some rather inventive immersion going for it which makes it the preferential way to go if your home theater setup allows for it. The film gets off to a relatively subdued sonic start, but once bodies start dropping, and especially once several characters are lost in a maze of marijuana plants in Agnes' basement, there are some really well done foley effects which often are very smartly placed in the surround channels. These vary from people running down aisles in between the plants to the marauding attacks of Agnes' Doberman Pincer. There's some rather boisterous LFE that occurs throughout the film, especially when various victims meet their fate (that's an almost unrecognizable Cary Elwes in a cameo as the meter reader in the film's prologue). Dynamic range is rather wide, especially in some of the climactic scenes.

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

Hansel & Gretel Get Baked Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

My colleague Brian Orndorf evidently liked Hansel & Gretel Get Baked at least a little more than I did (you can read his theatrical review here), so there is perhaps an audience for this kind of genre mash-up out there. My hunch is, though, that those coming to this expecting a stoner comedy are going to be grossed out by the gore and those who come expecting a gore-fest are going to be bored to tears by the stoner element. What's left is just a drug addled maze.