Reed Alexander's Review of "Popcorn (1991)."

Yeah, this was a fun movie. It was DUMB. I mean D. U. M. B. It was hammy as all hell and just plain silly as fuck. But I was just recently talking about the movie "Leprechaun" with some friends, and as I explained... that's kinda the fucking point! This is good-bad done right. You got the sense that the people making this movie had a lot of fun. It shown through with each scene and a lot of their dialogue. The plot itself was even kinda meta and also a lot of fun. I mean, a slasher at a horror grind house triple feature? C'mon, they knew this was going to be fun.

What I really love about this movie is all the mini movies that they had to run in order to give the feel of a triple feature. They made little clips of three separate movies that were also a hoot. So there were silly horror movies in their silly horror movie. I just loved the presentation.

Here's the thing: The plot is essentially similar to "Cigarette Burns" which is actually good horror. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that one could actually take the plot of this hammy side show, and make an actually decent horror out of it. I mean, sure, they'd have to get better actors, and an actual budget, tweak the plot a little bit, but the point is there was actually a good story in this bad horror. That pretty fucking impressive if you think about it.

But yeah, this movie is silly, riff worthy, and makes ironic fun of itself the whole way. I'd give it a watch.

SPOILER!!!

I'm tempted not to spoil this one as it actually is worth watching at least once even, if just to riff. But I feel it's necessary to mention WHY the story line is actually quite good.

You see, the plot follows this mysterious film that surrounds a cult whose leader wanted to capture real horror on film. He intended to sacrifice his entire family including multiple members of his cult as a live portion to the end of his bullshit artsy acid flick. The only problem was that one of his less certain members guns him down during the performance and escapes with his daughter. And that's just a small portion of the mystery to uncover in this little movie.

See? That's actually a neat little background they have there. It has all the right elements, all the right direction, it practically writes itself. Really, all these kids needed was a budget and some serious actors and this could have been a great movie as apposed to a silly straight-to-video production. But they knew they couldn't pull that off and ultimately just had fun with it. How awesome is that?

In the end, it turns out that the cult leader's daughter wasn't the only one to survive. A young boy who was there with them also survived, but only after being horrifically burned. So basically this kid grows up to be Darkman and develops masks that he can use to infiltrate society. Now he wants to reproduce the cult leader's masterpiece and that is the plot of the current movie. See how classic that shit sounds? Dude, the right director with the right people could make this silly nonsense into a great fucking film.

I just really appreciate that, even though they knew their movie was going to be shit, they spent all that time and effort developing it right. That's some pretty hardcore shit and they deserve a lot more credit for it than they clearly got.