Popcorn (1991) - Movie Review
What do you get when you take an incredible cast of Horror genre character actors, a fantastic setting, and incredible practical special effects?
A level of disappointment that exceeds the power of my rose colored glasses.
Let’s discuss.
Popcorn is a 1991 horror movie brought to us by writer/director Alan Ormsby, director Mark Herrier, and writer Mitchell Smith.
2 directors and 2 writers… yeah this movie was a shit show behind the scenes. We’re talking a nuclear level of production nightmares that show on screen. This film looks like 3 different movies, because it is. This film was made up of footage shot from 2 different directors with completely different ideas on what the story was meant to be. Then it was stitched together by a studio editor to try and salvage something from the project. This leads to an often boring, hollow experience that lacks the full humor one writer was aiming for and lacks the mystique the other attempted.
The film focuses on Maggie, a budding screenwriter who is attending her film school classes by day and writing her masterpiece by night. When her film class decides to hold a fundraiser movie marathon at a long condemned movie theater, they discover a strange reel of film. A snuff movie called Possessor, which when watched causes Maggie to collapse. The movie is exactly what she’s been writing, what’s she’s been seeing in her dreams. Unperturbed by the strange coincidence, the class moves on with the event and soon, they begin to be murdered in brutal fashion. Is the long dead filmmaker of Possessor back to complete his masterpiece or is Maggie just losing her mind? Either way, she’s running out of time to solve the mystery in today’s feature: Popcorn.
I did my best to make the movie sound exciting, but it’s really not.
This film is the stereotypical attempt of early 90’s films to be meta. It didn’t work for Fade to Black and it doesn’t work here. It didn’t work until the brilliant Kevin Williamson penned Scream, released in 1996.
What’s really sad about this project is that it could have been something special. The film was originally offered to the legendary director of Black Christmas and A Christmas Story, Bob Clark. But after the intense backlash and career devastation that resulted from Black Christmas’ release, Clark refused to ever direct another horror film. So he passed this off to one of his friends, Alan Ormsby to helm the picture. Ormsby had little experience directing. He is primarily a screenwriter, but at the time was trying out directing and was also an SFX artist.
He and Clark back the notorious, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things in 1972 and their friendship went up until the production of Popcorn when Ormsby was fired for taking too long to shoot the film within the film segments of the picture as he was quote, “too detail oriented.” Which if you speak Corman speak, means he was burning through money on something that wasn’t meant to be the focus of the film.
From what I can tell in my research— due to Ormsby’s error in focuses too much on the fake films that play during the movie marathon, there wasn’t much time or budget left for the rest of the film. To add to this headache, original lead actress Amy O’Neill left the production at this time as well.
Clark was forced to steady the ship. As an uncredited producer and uncredited 2nd unit director, he pulled double duty to try and help the film get completed. Porky’s actor Mark Herrier is credited as a director on the film, but it’s fairly obvious that Clark did all the heavy lifting as both Ormsby and Herrier never directed a feature again. Unfortunately, Clark didn’t have much to work with.
The script of this film is a mess as it’s actually 4 or 5 scripts in one. You have the initial, Supernatural dream monster idea of some kind of black magic murderer filmmaker haunting Maggie in her dreams, then there’s the slasher film with the mask swapping killer, and then there’s the films within the film all inspired by the classic B-Movies of the late 50’s and 60’s.
I wish they’d just been able to focus on one narrative—Especially with this cast!
Dee Wallace, Tom Villard, Tony Roberts, Ray Walston, Kelly Jo Minter, and wish.com Jamie Gertz: Jill Schoelen all in one film!
This could have been something special, but as with most Jill Schoelen led features, it fails in almost every regard. While she was in the incredibly underrated Stepfather from 1987, she was also the star of such flops as 1989’s Phantom of the Opera, 1989’s Cutting Class, 1989’s Curse II: The Bite, and 1993’s When a Stranger Calls Back. I’ve always found her to be attractive and fell in love with her in one of my favorite films of all time D.C. Cab. I have always loved her voice and as a kid I wondered why she wasn’t in more films. As an adult and professional writer, having spent my childhood up to my early 20’s as a stage actor, I completely understand.
She has the charisma of stale carrots.
She just sucks the life out of everyone around her like some kind of acting leech.
This isn’t an issue when you’ve got a scenery munching co-star like Terry O’Quinn, but when you’re the main star and the script is a complete turd—it’s a major issue.
It’s really evident in the scenes with Dee Wallace. Dee Wallace is an incredible actress and in my mind is the First Lady of the golden age of horror. She has an incredible emotional range. I mean, look at my favorite monster movie ever-The Howling. Wallace puts on a masterclass of scream queen acting. You care about her when she’s on the screen, she oozes charisma and charm while Schoelen is just wooden. They do not seem like mother and daughter and while the story tries to explain away why they look absolutely nothing alike but as most children of adoption can tell you looks, a family-bond do not make.
Much like the overrated Fade to Black from 1980, Popcorn has a great poster and admirable practical effects, but unlike Fade to Black, this film fails to set-up the killer in any meaningful way. At least in FTB, we understood the motivation and the abilities of the conflicted protagonist / antagonist. In this movie, they don’t even commit to who the killer is until the final 35 minutes. It’s implied that it’s a ghost released from the film at the beginning, but then it’s swapped for a generic slasher villain at the end of the film which stretches logic as the killer’s abilities to mimic other people’s voices is somehow tied to his Mission Impossible style masks he makes, which allows him to be an exact duplicate of anyone—but he is unable to mimic voices without a mask on in multiple scenes.
It doesn’t make sense.
What also doesn’t make sense are the multiple Reggae music montages. This is 91 minute film, but there’s 3 long form montages featuring terrible Reggae music performed by a band from the local area of Jamaica the film was shot within. The first montage is fine, it’s a fun—kids cleaning up a theater in record time and doing zany things type cut of which all 90’s kids were used to, but the 2nd and 3rd terrible reggae break kill any tension or momentum the film was approaching. One takes place after a brutal electrocution murder which leads to a blackout. This could have led to a tense chase through the pitch black theater, or some other cheap to film set piece, but instead they do a shitty music video of some upbeat trash song.
I have a feeling the initial cut of this film was closer to 70 minutes, and it shows.
There just isn’t a reason to watch this movie and it’s a shame.
This cast deserved better, especially the brilliant Tom Villard—who we lost too soon during the AIDS epidemic.
But, hey—At least the poster is tits.
If you want to punish yourself with a viewing of this dumpster fire, it’s streaming on the best service on the planet: SHUDDER.
