Box Art Review #9 - Popcorn

Box Art Review #9

Popcorn (1991)

Directed by Mark Herrier

Starring  Jill Schoelen, Dee Wallace

The Movie

Popcorn is a weird movie. Let me explain: a lot of horror movies are weird, I mean Freddy Krueger is weird as hell when you analyze the elements of his backstory/costume piece by piece, and most of John Carpenter’s output was ridiculously weird (except The Ward, which is just benign bullshit that should’ve been credited to Alan Smithee).

Reasons Popcorn is weird

1. The movie seems to have been made by people who have never seen a movie before. It has the same quality as a first novel written by a bored housewife who’s never written more than a grocery list before but suddenly decides she wants to be a writer. I mean, the dialog is corny in most cases, and when it’s not corny it sounds nothing like the way real people talk. Weirdly enough, there’s a short discussion early on where some film students discuss the sorry state of the late 80s/early 90s film industry and the works of Ingmar Bergman.

2. A bunch of shit just happens. You could say this about any movie, but Popcorn is different. It opens up with some bizarre experimental film footage, like something a college kid would make and then deem brilliant and then goes on to show even more weird footage of a cult leader/film director babbling about nothing. Then, it’s like, “hey let’s throw in a subplot about a guy who led a cult and movies and then killed his family live on stage, that’ll really spice up the charity movie festival.” What? Seriously, what?

3. The main chick’s mom is getting these phone calls from the guy in the weird videos and ends up at the movie theater with a gun where she sees his weird movie again and seems to know what’s up with the whole cult business. At this point, the film’s villain seems to be supernatural in origin, what with the crazy bullshit he pulls off. But no, not really.

4. Then there’s these film students who decide to put on a film festival with bad 50s B movies that use 4D gimmicks and we’re treated to a laughable montage with the worst reggae song about going to the movies that I’ve ever heard. Then, when the marathon happens there’s a bunch of people with crazy costumes and these two dudes are randomly rapping about monster movies or something. Then there’s a lame reggae band that shows up halfway through the marathon to inexplicably play music while the kids try to get the power back on. “But wait,” I asked aloud, “how are they playing music without electricity? They’re singing into a microphone for crying out loud!”

So those reasons are anything but concise, but the point is, this movie seems to exist outside of your typical Hollywood slasher fare (and yet it never quite goes into Lynchian territory). These might sound like complaints, but holy shit, this movie rules. Somehow all this weird crap just make the movie even better. It’s like this, these guys could’ve made a movie just about a slasher at a B movie marathon, but they went the extra mile and threw in all this weird shit about a cult leader and his experimental films and it’s ten times better for it.

Some of the best things about this movie: The villain is batshit crazy and looks awesome, the soundtrack is so stupid it’s awesome, the experimental films are awesome, the fake B movie footage is awesome, all the dumb comments from the audience during the B movies are awesome. The main character is played by Jill Schoelen who was in Babes in Toyland (along with Drew Barrymore, Keanu Reeves, and Pat Morita) which is a movie I remember we had on VHS, but I don’t remember ever watching it. The only black person is this movie is played by the chick with the incredibly annoying voice from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5: The Dream Child (apparently she was in Lost Boys and People Under the Stairs too, but I don’t remember her in them). Lastly, I’m pretty sure the Disney channel original movie Phantom of the Megaplex is an intentional ripoff of this movie and I remember liking that movie a lot too.

This movie is special. This is the kind of un-ironic fun slasher/horror that would never get made today because no one would take it seriously; where else are you gonna see a guy get pissed on by his own doppelganger and then die in a toilet bowl explosion?

The Cover

This is one of those rare occasions where the movie and the VHS cover are equally awesome. This cover/poster has everything I love, a skeleton, a ridiculous tagline, a killer, pointy font, and a glowing green haze surrounding everything. This cover is actually pretty similar to the cover for Society, except here they did it right. This is the kind of VHS cover I love, because this is the kind of movie I would’ve grabbed off the shelf in a heartbeat back in the heady days of video rental stores.

Movie: 5/5

Cover: 5/5