baumgart@esquire.dpw.com (The Phantom) (02/13/91)
POPCORN
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(baumgart@esquire.dpw.com)
Good horror films are few and far between, but good horror film
spoofs are so rare as to be an endangered species. POPCORN is, sadly,
not such a rare breed; if RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD or NIGHT OF THE
CREEPS are California condors, POPCORN is more like a New York pigeon:
it's a film that's messy, unavoidable, and not too bright.
On the other hand, who could argue with the film's tag line, which
is easily the cleverest thing about it. For weeks before it opened,
advertisements were plastered throughout the New York City subway
system, in every major newspaper, on television, and even in
participating video stores -- which only goes to show that the producers
know where lies their largest audience. For weeks we read the fruits of
some anonymous advertising exec's late-night brainstorm: "Buy a bag...
go home in a box." Chilling, no?
Well, no. The film's poster is nicely designed and features a
skull hiding behind the mask of a young girl's face. While this has as
little to do with the film as does the tag line, it does make for an
aesthetically pleasing poster, and given the state of the New York City
subways, the Phantom would never argue against a pleasant-looking --
though terribly misleading -- movie poster. The film itself features
neither skulls nor bags, and the only box in POPCORN is the one the
writers get themselves into fairly early on. Happily though, there is
in fact some popcorn in the film, albeit less than there was on the
theater floor during the Phantom's showing.
What there isn't is even a half-dozen suspenseful scenes, two or
three credible characters, acting at a level above a high school "Our
Town" production, or a remotely believable plot. Taken at face value,
POPCORN is not exactly food for the hungry horror phan, though if one
ignores the misleading advertising and takes it as what the Phantom will
bet it was intended as -- a relatively harmless and exceedingly mild
spoof of all the corny 1950s horror films we so loved on Saturday
afternoons and late Sunday nights on Chiller Theater -- it's just barely
enough to tide you over until heartier fare is served.
It took a while before it occurred to the Phantom that the
filmmakers could not possibly have intended us to take POPCORN
seriously, but that points out one of its worst failings as a horror
parody: for a film that was intended to satirize recent and not so
recent horror films, it's neither outrageously funny, ridiculously gory,
laughingly scripted nor paced and acted as if Edward D. Wood Jr. --
father of the classic PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE -- were directing from
beyond the grave. Most of the time, POPCORN just sits there like the
unpopped, bottom-of-the-bag kind of film it is, going through the all
too familiar paces of a half-baked horror sendup. By the time the film
was half over, the Phantom had thoughts of some of POPCORN's brothers in
horror parody failure: STUDENT BODIES, SATURDAY THE 14TH, TRANSYLVANIA
6-5000. And his thoughts were these: "I wonder if I should leave now
and get an early start on my tax return." Sadly, the Phantom's taxes
remain unpaid and as the evening wore on, his dreams for a satisfying
horror film went unfulfilled.
The plot -- such as it is -- is held together with what turns out
to be yet another spoof, though alas not a very successful one. While
an audience is assembled to watch a "horror-thon", a vengeful psychopath
takes his revenge (as vengeful psychopaths often do) on the members of
the film school class who are running the show. These poor folks need
to raise money to continue their brave efforts at independent
filmmaking, or perhaps to exhume Mr. Wood to direct POPCORN II -- the
Phantom wasn't quite clear on this point, his thoughts having begun
their inexorable drift to the ides of April even at that early stage.
Nonetheless, the resourceful auteurs-to-be shortly set to work at the
horror film spoof equivalent of fixing up the old barn to put on a show:
renovating a local theater palace and preparing to put on a triple-bill
of old horror and science fiction duds from the fifties, evidently
expecting people to pay $10 to see ancient classics presented complete
with their original in-theater special effects, including the miracle of
3-D, the miracle of Shock-O-Vision, and the miracle of Smell-O-Vision.
As the Phantom himself had just paid $7.50 (plus $2 for soda) to see
POPCORN -- in the miracle of Soon-To-Be-On-Cable-Vision -- he wasn't at
all surprised to see the auditorium soon fill to capacity with lovers of
schlock cinema.
Naturally, once the shows begin the poor film students start
getting dispatched in ways that mirror -- more or less -- the action on
the screen. Curiously, the action on *their* screen is much more
enjoyable and much better done than is the action on ours. POPCORN
succeeds to some small degree in satirizing hoary old shockers like
TARANTULA; it does less well with a parody of a random "Incredible Blah
Blah Blah Man" flick, and by the time the film arrives at "The Stench"
-- yes, that's the name, not the review, folks -- the Phantom wasn't
quite sure what on Earth was being sent up. But the film itself is only
interesting during those brief, voyeuristic periods when we're watching
what everyone in the film is watching. Once their -- and our --
attention returns to the action in the theater itself, it's time to
start contemplating our withholding statements again.
But what if the inept action off-screen was *also* intended to be a
parody? By the time he'd begun to consider whether he was making a
sufficiently large contribution to his IRA, it dawned on the Phantom
that the filmmakers surely could not have meant anyone to take *any* of
the film seriously -- unlike, say, DAWN OF THE DEAD or AN AMERICAN
WEREWOLF IN LONDON, POPCORN was not supposed to be a horror film with
elements of parody. Instead, they must have intended the film *itself*
to be a spoof. This put things in a different light, though sadly not
in a more favorable one, for it turns out that POPCORN spends most of
its time attempting unsuccessfully to parody the worst cliches from some
of the worst of the early-eighties slash-and-trash horror films. In
case you managed to avoid the great tidal waves of FRIDAY THE 13TH
clones and knockoffs that washed up on the shores of the horror cinema a
decade ago, stop by your local Blockbusters and rent the absolute nadir
of the genre, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. This is the sort of film where
stupid adolescents are killed with metronome-like regularity in highly
unique and improbable ways by an all-too-obvious killer, who without
fail turns out to be yet another slighted adolescent who decides to do
in the entire senior class because he couldn't get a date for the prom.
It's the sort of film in which the sheer number and kinds of killings
were advertised as pretty much the only reason to see it -- after all,
where else could you see teenagers killed with fireplace pokers and dumb
bells and spatulas and tuning forks and the like? Best of all, it was
named after a holiday, which as everyone who's been a horror phan since
HALLOWEEN knows is a sure way to make a few extra bucks at the box
office. We missed GROUND HOG'S DAY: THE SHADOW'S REVENGE, but we got
GRADUATION DAY, MY BLOODY VALENTINE, NEW YEAR'S EVIL, SILENT NIGHT,
DEADLY NIGHT, and on and on. We even got THE DAY AFTER HALLOWEEN,
surely one of the most cynically titled films of all time (though BEYOND
THE FOG -- a film that had as little to do with THE FOG as THE DAY AFTER
HALLOWEEN had to do with HALLOWEEN -- runs a close second).
Such films should be simple to parody -- after all, their premises
are so predictable, their "surprises" are so unsurprising, and their
acting and dialog are so awful -- but although POPCORN comes close at
times, it really never has its heart in it -- it never really lets loose
and becomes a classic like NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, EVIL DEAD 2, REANIMATOR
or RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Instead, it's a parody done with the
straightest of faces, one that fritters away its entire first half
setting up a NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET-like plot just to discard it and
head for the ridiculous in the last third of the film. POPCORN feels a
lot like a film that was designed by a committee, or perhaps a film
started by one person and finished by someone else. Regardless, it
winds up as an abject failure of a horror film, and a big disappointment
of a horror film parody.
It's a shame, really, because POPCORN does have some intentionally
-- or so the Phantom assumes -- hilarious moments, and the whole premise
of the film did manage to get the Phantom's mind off his 1040 every so
often. It might work better, perhaps, for those phans who can remember
seeing horror films in the fifties and sixties, back before the advent
of Cinema 1-2-3-N and video, when in-theater special effects were the
rage and just going to a movie at all was a special event. The Phantom
himself indulged in some mock nostalgia, since although he's too young
to remember those days, he does have a great fondness for the Rialtos
and Bijous of days gone by.
But alas, there is little more than that to recommend POPCORN.
Although this is the first horror film (parody or not) to be released in
a couple of months, it's no longer the only one out there, as THE
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS will be in general release in a matter of days. At
best, POPCORN is the very definition of a "wait for video" horror film,
and then only if all the copies of MISERY have already been rented.
Horror film parodies are indeed hard to find, and if the Phantom's
review has piqued your curiousity, you might want to give EVIL DEAD 2 a
try (though you should see the first one first, if only so you'll know
what's being parodied). RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, directed by Dan
O'Bannon, does a fine job of sending up George Romero's horror classic
-- when shooting a zombie in the head fails to stop it, one character
even says "But it worked in the movie!" -- and in it's own strange way,
CHILD'S PLAY still stands as one of the best slash-and-trash parodies
ever made (in addition to being a great horror film in its own right).
The $7.50 you'll save by avoiding POPCORN will more than cover the
rental fees for all three of these films, and you'll surely be able to
keep your mind off your taxes longer than the Phantom was able to.
Given that POPCORN will probably appear on video around the middle of
April, this seems particularly appropriate.
: The Phantom
: baumgart@esquire.dpw.com
: {cmcl2,uunet}!esquire!baumgart