Popcorn

Saturday, October 11, 2008

This one is kind of a mess, but weird enough that I would say that I enjoyed it. There are way too many disjointed things going on in the story, it has a b-movie motif that goes nowehere, and I think it's a horror/comedy but it's not very funny. On the other hand, the kills are so inexplicable that it lends a kind of fascination to the movie... one dude is impaled on a giant prop mosquito, in another part the killer locks a guy in a toilet and somehow drops some pellets of some chemical (?) in the water that turns into gas and kills him... I mean, I don't know about you, I didn't think those were exactly great kills, but they were both firsts for me. And there's some cool stuff with the killer, who makes life-like masks of his victims and then goes around pretending to be them. This leads to some neat special effects of him switching faces.

Alan Ormsby was originally going to direct this. He was a frequent collaborator with Bob Clark, co-wrote some of Clark's horror movies, and even directed his own kinda bad but also pretty memorable horror movie Deranged in the 70's (Update 9/16/09: Greetings from the future! I saw Deranged again a few months ago and now I like it!). Popcorn would have been his second directorial effort, but apparently he was fired or he left and was replaced by some other no-name (an actor from the Porky's movies, which Ornsby and Clark worked on) a few weeks into filming. Something seems weirdly illogical about this. Ornsby wasn't up to snuff, so they replaced him with an actor from a shitty sex comedy? That seemed like a better alternative?