Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Killer Cakes’ On Prime Video, Where Expert Artists Compete To Make The Scariest, Ooziest, Tastiest Cakes

It’s officially “spooky season”, which means that we’re going to be seeing a lot of Halloween-themes cooking and baking competitions. In Killer Cakes on Prime Video, teams of cake artists are tasked with making the scariest, creepiest, ooziest cakes they can conceive. But they have to also taste good!

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Opening Shot: Scenes from the two episodes of Killer Cakes , with host Matthew Lillard talking about fear in a voice over, saying, “But what happens if our greatest fear is cake?”

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The Gist: In Killer Cakes , teams of expert cake artists create the scariest, grossest, ooziest and tastiest cakes they can concoct for a $20,000 prize and the “Golden Knife” trophy.

Four teams of two compete in the first episode, with one being eliminated at the end. In the second episode, the remaining three teams compete for the grand prize. In the first round, the cake artists have six hours to create their scary confections, with three requirements: There must be movement, there must be a weapon crafted to cut into the cake, and there must be an element that squirts or oozes “blood.”

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To help the teams with the special effects portion of the task are SFX experts Ashley Levy and Tom Woodruff Jr. The judges who will be examining and eating each finished product are horror actress Danielle Harris and spooky food artist Nikk Alcaraz.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Killer Cakes is like the Halloween Baking Championship but much scarier.

Our Take: Aside from the “abandoned warehouse” set and the creepy/scary nature of the cakes that are being put together, Killer Cakes is similar to other baking and cooking competition shows. The challenge is given, and the bulk of the episode depicts the chefs/bakers/food artists putting together their ideas and facing the challenges that may outstrip their ambition, then the judges taste the food and give their critiques before choosing a winner and eliminating a team.

Given that this series is really a two-part special that looks like it was shot during one long day on a soundstage, there’s no reason to avoid the show, unless you feel squeamish about, say, seeing a cake shaped like a serial killer sitting in an electric chair wearing clothes made from the skins of the people he killed.

Given that Blumhouse is producing this show, along with Cake Boss producers High Noon Entertainment, it’s fairly certain that they were going to find cake artists that can do complex and scary-looking creations in a relatively short period of time. We do like that they have two SFX experts to help the artists achieve the movement requirement; the producers are not expecting these artists to be SFX engineers, which helps them concentrate on the other aspects of the artistry, like blood drips and other details.

What we wish we saw a little bit more of is how the structure of certain creations were done; one team seemed to have a wood frame for a fake chest freezer in place before the first hour was supposedly up. Another team didn’t seem to sweat creating the aforementioned electric chair. Were they helped along by on-set carpenters? Why not mention that? It could also have been a case where, given the designs the teams had were likely conceived before the cameras started rolling, the producers had those more structured elements ready for them in order to save them time doing something other than cake-making.

We’d also would have wanted the prize to be a skosh higher than $20,000. Sure, it’s better than nothing, and all the contestants were happy to compete for it. But a ton of effort is going into these creations; you’d think that each winner would be able to take home more than $10k each (before taxes) for that effort.

Sex and Skin: None. There’s lots of gooey raspberry “gore,” though.

Parting Shot: The last-place team is eliminated with the phrase “You’re dead to us.” We then see scenes from the second and final episode.

Sleeper Star: Although Lillard is the host, we’ll give him the Sleeper award because of his enthusiasm as he sees edible body parts and oozing orifices. He says “This is awesome!” or something similar multiple times through the first episode.

Most Pilot-y Line: Sometimes the judge’s critiques feel very ticky-tacky, like they were directed to say something negative, even if they overall were blown away by what they were judging.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Given the skill of the cake artists, Lillard’s enthusiasm as host and the fact that the season consists of two 45-minute episodes, Killer Cakes feels like good a laundry-folding watch with a spooky-season theme.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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