Popcorn Review (1991)

I’ve just watched my Popcorn Blu-ray again and I think my brain is now wearing 3D glasses that I can’t take off. This film is a schlock-carnival midnight B-movie massacre in a cursed theater where logic dies screaming. I watched for the Horror. I finished with a headache, a hard-on and an overwhelming desire to throw a B-Horror party every night for the rest of my life.
Let me tell you what this movie is: it’s Scream if it was raised by William Castle and electrocuted at birth. It’s Phantom of the Opera after drinking expired booze and watching TV static for 12 hours. It’s cinema loving itself so hard that it can’t just not release anything that stumbles in the door. And I love it, I always have!
The plot is hilariously secondary. A film student named Maggie (who may or may not be possessed, reincarnated, or just over-caffeinated) is having weird dreams about a missing cult director who looks like if Salvador Dalí mated with a toaster. Naturally, she and her pals decide to host a Horror marathon in a movie palace so dilapidated it probably smells like mildew and unspeakable sins.
Then people start dying, and not gently. They get death by giant mosquito, death by smell-o-vision and death by volcanic stage props. It’s like watching Looney Tunes if Elmer Fudd had homicidal schizophrenia. The kills are spectacularly wonderful though, no denying it.
But the real star here is The Theater, a moldy mausoleum of flickering reels and rotting dreams. Every corner of that place oozes the kind of sticky nostalgia that feels like a nicotine-stained hallucination. I could smell the popcorn through the screen, and it reeked of trauma and dirty deeds. I fucking hate Popcorn as is, but this movie KILLS.
The killer here is a facially-melting, mask-wearing chaos gremlin who changes identities like he's playing dress-up in Satan’s wardrobe. Who cares, he kills someone with a giant mosquito.
Popcorn ties you to a theater seat with reels of cursed celluloid and force-feeds you every half-baked Horror gimmick from 1955 to 1989. It’s like eating rabies infested candy but it was the best candy you ever tasted.
Popcorn is a hot mess. A beautiful, chaotic, inexplicable hot mess that continues to make me fall in love with B-Horror movies every time I watch it. The Synapse Blu-Ray edition is a wonderful reissue that cuts to the bone, specifically on a big screen. Don’t miss the chance the chance to get possessed!
~Black Angel