AVAILABLE ON TUBI! In Bron Theron’s revenge thriller, Pancake Man, if a crazed man asks for a plate of pancakes, for God’s sake, give the man his pancakes. It’s not worth pulling burgers out of the freezer when you don’t need them.
Jerry (Michael Della Pia) is down on his luck, and that is an understatement. He was never a rage-filled man…or at least, that’s what everyone close to him thought. But every man has his breaking point. Look, all Jerry wants on this particular morning is a plate of pancakes. He walks into a local diner and puts in his order. The answer is no. The kitchen stopped serving breakfast ten minutes before the posted sign said breakfast ended. It’s lunch now. But rules are rules, and the diner is violating its own. The cook isn’t making exceptions. Jerry doesn’t handle the news well.
Things escalate fast, and the young kid behind the register is stabbed to death with a fork. Another customer tries to step in to defuse the situation, and another body is down. Soon, there is a stack of bodies. By the time anyone figures out what just happened, Jerry is already gone and nowhere close to finished.
The press catches on quickly. The pancake story is too strange not to run with, and the nickname lands: Pancake Man. Jerry decides it’s time to go after everyone who wronged him, like the guys working on his car and the lawyer who represented his wife in Jerry’s divorce. He also garners the attention of a local street gang and, worse, the local mob boss.
“Jerry decides it’s time to go after everyone who wronged him, like the guys working on his car and the lawyer who represented his wife in Jerry’s divorce.”
Pancake Man is an indie production that takes Death Wish and dials it up to eleven while having the budget down to two. Like many of the revenge films that preceded it, Pancake Man is the catharsis we all want when pushed to our limits and can only find by living vicariously through Jerry.
In describing his inspiration, writer/director Theron said, “It started as a joke on set, but it quickly became something deeper—a story about what happens when someone gets pushed too far. It’s about the unseen impact we have on each other’s lives.”
The story is very simple. A man who’s felt wronged all his life now finally gets a chance to “right the wrongs” in his own life by feeling like a hero and doing for others the justice that he never got. For Bron Theron, I’m sure the story was a joy to write, but the film’s fun is in the B-movie violence and all the ways you can kill a man with a fork before escalating to office supplies and then proper weapons in the end.
Pancake Man is not necessarily as nuanced as Shakespeare. You do have characters who cross moral lines for purely selfish reasons: thugs who inflict pain for the fun of it, and an underworld that uses each other for the sheer fun of it. You will be taken on a wild ride of violence and revenge. It’s messy, bloody, and oozes an indie spirit of violence for the sake of violence.
Pancake Man is available to stream on Tubi TV.
"…for God's sake, give the man his pancakes."
