Popcorn (1991) Directed by Mark Herrier
The 1980s was the golden age of slasher movies, especially the early 80s. The genre blew up after Halloween came out and was followed by classics like Friday the 13th, Prom Night, and My Bloody Valentine. The mid 80s was lifted by A Nightmare on Elm Street, but with so many lackluster sequels and straight to video slashers hitting the market, the audience died down with the movie quality. By the time the 90s hit, people were worn out of the slasher genre (much like I am expecting to happen to the superhero genre, hopefully) and movies like Popcorn go rather unnoticed. I have seen hundreds of slasher movies, name it I have pretty much heard of it or I have seen it. With all these movies I have realized that the early 90s was a cesspool for slashers, but one movie rises above the shit, the movie Popcorn is that gem. For some reason though this movie had a limited DVD release and has never had a bluray release, seriously get on that Scream Factory! Well let’s take a dive into an underrated film in the genre and a rather interesting take on the formula.
The film starts with a bizarre acid trip like dream from our main character Maggie played by Stepfather main girl Jill Schoelen. She wakes up and talks into a tape recorder, describing her dream, using the recorder as a dream journal. Maggie’s mother Suzanne gets an odd phone call from a dude that sounds like Freddy Krueger, but she no sells it and hangs up. Sorry for the wrestling term there, no sells it means she plays it off like nothing happened. Maggie goes off to school, which I assume is a college because of her age, but she lives at home so it is quite odd. Here we meet Mark, and Mark is a horndog. He runs up in broad daylight and tells Maggie that he wants her right there. Ok dude, tuck your boner up into your waistband and get to class. Maggie goes to her film class and there is a fat dude with curly hair and he’s annoying, like any other fat dude with curly hair in a horror movie. The teacher talks about the old movie gimmicks of the 50s, like odorama and props. I have to mention that Maggie is sitting in the back doodling the whole time and has an awful early 90s haircut with laser leveled bangs, which is a shame because Jill Schoelen is a pretty attractive woman. The teacher comes up with the idea of showing three or four old sci fi/horror movies and utilizing the old gimmicks from the past in the old theater in town.
Later the group goes to the theater and they look things over. Someone says how it is impossible to set up the theater in three days for the festival, then the crotchety old teacher from Fast Times at Ridgemont High shows up and says with his help they can do it. He brings all the old gimmicks in cases for them to set up and he’s basically a master at assembling them. Well, they have some work to do to get this ready, and they need to do it ASAP! Guess what they do? Montage! Insert corny music, but not odd 80s music with bad synth, no not at all! You see this movie was made in 1991, yeah that odd transition period between huge hair and flannel. So what do we get? A weird reggae song called Saturday Night at the Movies or something. Here we get to see that they have a friend that is bound to a wheel chair, because there’s always one in a slasher movie it seems. While unpacking the cases they find a film canister that is labeled “do not open” so hey…lets play it! They put the film on and it is a shot of a dude’s eye, his mouth, and him saying “the possessor” over and over. Maggie freaks out, realizing it is the guy from her dream earlier, and she blacks out. She comes to and the professor tells them it was a movie made by Lanyard Gates, a drug fueled film maker that left the movie unfinished and planned the ending to be live in audience. What was the ending? Oh you know, a monologue followed with…THE MURDER OF HIS FUCKIN FAMILY! Yeah that’s kind of intense. So when the dude tried to kill his family, he was shot and the theater was set ablaze. His family died and his body was never found. It is about this time that I realized Jill Schoelen’s acting ability is a little limited in this movie, she was much better in The Stepfather.
That night Suzanne gets another call from who we can only assume is Lanyard Gates since he mentions the Possessor. Suzanne goes to the theater with a gun, Bronson style, and the letters on the marquee fly off. Now the marquee reads “The Possessor” and a ticket pops out of the booth for Suzanne. The voice talks to her again, and it is hard to describe like a mix of Freddy Krueger and Shredder or any 80s cartoon villain. She walks into the theater and the Possessor plays on the screen, suddenly the head of Lanyard Gates shows up and talks to Suzanne. She has a quick conversation with him and he yells “goodbye Suzanne!” She runs off and a shadowy figure follows her, she fires her gun and drops the fucker. Suddenly Suzanne is grabbed from behind and we can only assume she is dead.
Fast forward to opening night, which I believe was the next day and they play a terrible rap song. Maggie works the ticket booth when Mark shows up with some Kelly Bundy wannabe bimbo, thus making him a doucher and a horndog, great. A man walks up with Lanyard Gates’s voice and calls Maggie, Sarah. Maggie tries to go after him but can’t seem to find him. She is pretty certain it is Lanyard because he mentions the Possessor, oh and it is his DAMN VOICE lol. The reason she looks for him? Not to get him arrested, not to ask him why he did what he did, not even to ask him to leave, she thinks his story would make a good movie. Brilliant! The crowd pours into the theater and you see a guy with a huge, massive skeleton head on, blocking the view of at least three people. I would be the guy directly behind that asshole! They start the first movie called “Mosquito” and every five minutes some idiot shouts a joke, like straight up screams like Danny from Trailer Park Boys. Everyone laughs each time, I think if I was there, I would be a little annoyed.
Mark walks off from his date and sneaks up on Maggie, she turns and he hits his head and falls over. Meanwhile, Davis is setting up a big mosquito to fly around by remote control on a wire. The mosquito flies into the crowd and scares everyone, someone comes down with a big can of bug spray and chases it. The killer pulls out a remote and takes control of the mosquito, causing it to fly back to Davis and the mosquito impales him. The killer grabs the body and takes off with it. The next scene shows a tub of water with faces floating in it. The killer makes a mold of Davis’s face and puts it on like a mask. Mark and Maggie have a argument about Lanyard Gates when Toby comes in and yells at them for locking the door. Mark leaves and he attempts to go back to his seat but some huge dude that looks like Roy from the Office is in his place, he refuses to move. Mark, annoyed that Roy couldn’t find his own bimbo tries to act tough with him and Roy knocks his block off. Maggie has another vision of Gates and he continually calls her Sarah. She somehow comes to the assumption that Sarah was Gates’s daughter, how? Idk.
Mark again shows up, again gets hit in the face somehow, like three times dude cmon! He’s basically Urkel without the annoying voice and catchphrases. The killer, which we assume is Lanyard by now, has the mask of Davis’s face on his face (no Nicholas Cage isn’t in this movie, neither is Travolta) and calls Tina towards him. Tina wants to take a ride on his bone rollercoaster and she kisses him. The prosthetic face sticks to her lips and she screams, Lanyard kills her and tries to leave with the body. Maggie and Mark find Tina leaning up against the railing in the catwalk and Lanyard does a Weekend at Bernie’s with Tina’s corpse making her nod and point etc. He throws his voice to sound like her and Maggie and Mark leave. Now they show Bud who is in charge of shocking the seats of the audience during the Electric Man movie. Lanyard sneaks up behind him and bounds him to a chair. Bud’s first reaction is that of delight, thinking someone wants to have kinky sex with him. Weird! I mean if someone snuck up behind me and bound me to a chair I would be pissed and think they’re trying to kill me. Lanyard sets a tape recorder down in front of Bud and the tape explains what is going on. He sets up jumper cables to his chair, to the plug of the mixing board and then puts two audio cables into two different inputs. He says something about one of the lights lighting up and Bud will get shocked to death. It is basically like a Jigsaw trap, kind of interesting but the way he hooked stuff up I’m pretty sure wouldn’t do jack shit. Anyway, all the lights go off and Bud gets fried, the power surge causes the lights to go out and stuff to go haywire.
Maggie and Mark go to flip the breaker and Mark falls down the stairs because he’s Urkel without the catchphrases, DID I DO THAT?! Maggie notices that Bud is now dead, Lanyard talks to her again calling her Sarah and she runs away in slow motion, for some reason but it is glorious. Somehow in her trip from the catwalk back to the basement to find Mark she realizes she is Sarah, Lanyard’s daughter and Suzanne is actually her aunt that saved her life. Toby comes down to the basement and also falls downstairs, cmon guys. Maggie goes down after them and finds Tina’s body, Lanyard creeps up on her and the lights come back on. Lanyard has captured Maggie and he puts her in his machine to make a mask. He then talks to her in Toby’s voice and explains he can speak in any voice with his electronic voice modulator. Awesome I want one! He then tells her that he’s not really Lanyard Gates, Lanyard is dead. He is actually Toby, and he was in the theater when Lanyard played Possessor and was burned up badly. His face was completely destroyed, so that’s why he makes masks to cover his destroyed face. Here he tells her about his everyday routine to look human again. Basically he wants to finish Lanyard’s plan of murdering his family live on stage. Then he shows that Suzanne is alive, but trapped in a huge cast with gun in hand. Now to Leon is setting up the Odorama for the Stench movie. He has to rock a piss and goes to the urinal. Suddenly he notices that he is standing next to himself, when he’s attacked. He hides into a stall but something drops into the toilet causing a gas to come out and kill him. It must have been bleach and ammonia or something.
The blonde girl, can’t remember her name, professes her love to Toby and he storms out of the room. Tony then has a long psychotic monologue towards Suzanne about the night he was burned and how he is going to ritually kill her and Maggie/Sarah like Gates should have, its pretty awesome actually…BRAVO! Mark goes to Toby’s apartment and talks to his landlord, whom I think is shitfaced, he goes on about Toby screaming a lot and having a room full of skulls and body parts, but doesn’t think he’s a murderer, what the fuck? Mark sees the newspaper clippings about the Gates incident and runs back to the theater. The Stench is interrupted by The Possessor put in the projector by Toby. He then walks down the aisle screaming “I hate this movie!” He walks behind the curtains and puts Maggie into an Iron Maiden and makes a remark about her thinking it was just a metal band. All three are now on stage, Toby, Maggie and Suzanne. The curtains open and Maggie screams for help, the audience thinks it is all an act and they cheer on. Toby asks the crowd to count down, because at midnight he plans to kill both Maggie and Suzanne. Mark arrives in the balcony for some reason and slides down a cable to stop Toby. He misses by a football field and crashes into some boxes, causing the mosquito to fly down and impale Toby to death. Suzanne and Maggie are rescued and the cops show up to take things over. The credits run and a terrible rap song about horror plays.
I know I made fun of a lot of this movie, but that’s me. Just because I make fun of something doesn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it, because hell I like this movie a lot. I like it so much that I bought a fright-rags shirt of it, that is totally awesome. Toby is an awesome slasher villain and actually a pretty damn good actor, his monologues were great, very passionate and believable. That is a rare thing in slasher movies, acting is usually awful all around in the genre. Jill Schoelen, while not the best actress is always very likeable and cute. The idea of the killer being a master mask maker is a neat concept and something different in a genre full of copycats. The theater showing the old films looks like a super fun idea that I would love to go to on Halloween. It is funny this whole movie was shot in Kingston, Jamaica, because you would never know. I thought it was shot in California or something, so that totally blindsided me when I read it. During filming the director was replaced and the lead was also replaced. The original director made the three scifi movies within the movie, while Porky’s actor Mark Herrier is credited with filming the rest. The music is beyond corny borderline awful but it has a certain charm that kind of fits the film. The movie wasn’t a box office success and has a low score on rotten tomatoes for some reason. I enjoy this film each time I see it and I love the killer. Mark is annoying hero because he’s such a clumsy jug headed idiot. The atmosphere is awesome and the acting is decent, like I said I think Toby is quite awesome. After reading Wikipedia, they claim that a Bluray is planned for release through Synapse Films, so that should be a good one. I have the Synapse Bluray for Curtains and that is pretty damn good. All in all, this movie is a fun, interesting inclusion on the slasher genre that I really enjoy. It maybe the best traditional slasher movie of the 90s, but there isn’t much competition. I would give Popcorn a solid B+ as much as I love it, it isn’t a movie I think about all the time, nor is it a movie that I need to watch every year. Give it a shot, the entire movie is on Youtube free to watch. It was on Netflix years ago but has since been removed sadly. I can’t wait for the bluray release!
