Saturday Night At The Movies!: Popcorn (1991)

Popcorn (1991) (AKA "Phantom of The Cinema")
Rating: ****
Starring: Jill Schoelen, Tom Villard and Dee Wallace

Fifteen years ago, enigmatic director, producer and possibly cult leader Lanyard Gates finished a film called The Possessor which was seemingly lost in a fire that not only engulfed a theater it was being screened at, but also took the life of Gates himself despite no actual body ever found.

Forwarding ahead to the present, Maggie (Jill Schoelen) attends a film school where she, her classmates and a professor plan a B-Movie Horror-thon as a project, featuring films that utilized shlocky gimmicks like hovering 3D props, electrifying Shock-o-Rama and stinky Odor-Vision. The movie marathon will be held in, by luck, the same theatre Gates worked at during his filming of The Possessor. It's a film festival they can all enjoy until a horribly burnt figure starts to take the lives of Maggie's friends one by one. Could it be Gates? Somehow surviving his southern fried fate and has now returned with a vengeance?

With plot holes everywhere and a passable bodycount, Popcorn (1991) should have been a disastrous movie. Its box office bombed, resulting to the movie ending up getting tossed from one discount theatre to the next, barely making any recognition. Still, for slasher fans, this is a movie that tried to be different and fun by embracing the same gimmicky practices it satirizes, something a lot of us learned to appreciate over the years.

For starters, Popcorn (1991) knew how to handle its characters as, while being a horror film, you can tell there's a lighthearted feel to them to the point they're chummy despite a few animosities in between, making them such a strong and likable cast. Though the individual characterizations might be weak per se (and so might be some of the performances), they're the tolerable corniness that's reminiscent of the 80s cheese, making Popcorn (1991) a film that sparks nostalgia for the sub-genre's golden decade. Other lighthearted moments include an 80s-inspired montage of our gang happily preparing the theater, a reggae band playing a catchy pop song during a momentary black out and, snippets of the fictional 50s B-movies being played from time to time!

The story, may it be bombarded with holes, still has enough thrills, eerie moments and estranged situations to keep a fan glued to the screen. Some references to Italian gialli are used to give the film a macabre taste such as black gloved- hands preparing weapons, mannequins to distract victims, fancy colored lighting and trippy imagery. The kills, while indeed are little in count and dry of blood, build fair tension and are often memorable for their bizarre nature. Where else can you find death-by-poisoned stink bomb? Or a man impaled on a giant mosquito prop?

The climax also features a clever twist on the identity of the killer and their connections to Gates' fiery incident, giving the villain a personality and a motive that is similar to Wes Craven's Scream (1996). The killer's habit of putting face masks may not sound like a new idea, but Popcorn (1991)'s has a neat twist to it; instead of a mask of pure flesh or paper-mache, our killer creates realistic latex faces to move around undetected and lure their victims in. While no Scooby-Doo style unmasking happened here, we did got a good look on the killer's real face and it ain't pretty!

Lastly, and perhaps Popcorn (1991)'s strongest point, is that it took us for a good stroll back further into memory lane with the snazzy gimmicks used to make old shcool popcorn fright flicks an experience. Popcorn (1991) is kinda like that, a gimmick that shows off its love letter approach to those decades of dangling skeletons, multiple endings and electro-buzzers on seats, when you could have fun and be your greasy, horror obsessed self. Even with its modest budget, you got to hand it to the movie's resourcefulness for props and sets (That Shock-Clock. I want one, now!) to give it an enjoyable big-budget look.

A few years before the witty, self-satire of Scream (1996), Popcorn (1991) made a good run at that and, while flawed, still managed to be entertaining. It may suffer from the 90s disease of tame kills and teenage angst, but its enthusiastic plotting, solid cast, and homage to 50s horror era, you can't go wrong with a viewing of this cult classic.

Bodycount:

1 male sucked dry by giant mosquito (film)

1 male impaled by giant mosquito prop

1 female strangled with rope

5 males electrocuted (film)

1 female suicide, electrocutes herself (film)
1 paraplegic male electrocuted in a makeshift electric chair out of his own wheelchair
1 female stabbed with knife (flashback)
1 male shot (flashback)
1 male inhaled poison gas
1 male impaled on giant mosquito prop
Total: 7 (14 with film deaths)

Shock Clock! Everybody wants one!