After replacing his screenwriter, Alan Ormsby, at the directorial helm, actor Mark Herrier created his debut feature, Popcorn, a highly anticipated work which once again brings together the famed horror one-two punch that is comprised of the aforementioned scriptwriter and director Bob Clark (as producer). Not surprisingly, the duo’s cinematic prowess is abundant as always but their efforts are countered by the novice filmmaking of the former as Popcorn becomes one of horror’s greatest “Might Have Been’s.”
When a cinophile collective at a local college is relegated to holding their meetings in dwindling corners of the campus, they organize a fundraiser in hopes of salvaging their flailing studies. The group decides upon a sure-fire moneymaker: an all-night horrorthon in which they will not only entertain and frighten, but educate one and all in the history of the genre via a series of vintage B-movie flicks. To lend an air of joviality to the proceedings, a film historian by the name of Doctor Mnesyne (Ray Walston) offers his collection of vintage movie props from the bygone days of horror cinema. However, after the festival commences, those in charge realize that a killer is present, which Maggie (Jill Schoelen) believes to be Lanyard Gates, a failed filmmaker-turned-murder who has come back to reenact the slayings he committed fifteen years prior.
Half a decade before Wes Craven’s Scream, Popcorn challenged its audience with self-reflective postmodern sensibilities. In a work which is equal parts Phantom of the Opera, William Castle’s The Tinger-cum-Lamberto Bava’s Demons, and Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Herrier’s film-within-a-film is revealed to be the equivalent to postmodernism deconstructing its own subjectivity for the former encases a character named Maggie, whom we come to discover is–in the transcription her dreams for a film script–further exacerbating the production’s philosophic mobius strip in that her artistic endeavor is revealed to be the consequence of the latter. In short, Maggie is having subconscious visions (to make matters worse, the Cineplex in the film proper is titled “Dream Land”) of a film which, during the feature, she will later come in contact. To add insult to injury, by production’s end, Herrier and Co. pull a Pirandello as they blur the line–while mocking audience apathy–between the screen/stage and the onscreen, as well as actual, audience.
Much like Craven’s postmodern take on the slasher genre, Popcorn also hosts a barrage of in-jokes, to film as well as itself. The festival boasts of William Castle-esque gimmickry and faux films. Of course, for any serious student of the genre, such is not only a wet dream vicariously manifested but also a mouth-watering, albeit once-removed, game of trivia as Herrier’s write-up of notorious B-movies of yesteryear become the penultimate cat-and-mouse game with its viewer, second-only to the bonus points for citing the original publicity stunts which the filmmaker is likewise alluding. As such, the playbill reads “Mosquito” in “Project-O-Vision,” “Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man” in “Shock-O-Scope,” and “The Stench” replete with “Aroma-rama.”
Though the former–sated with its Ed Woodian stock footage amid cinematography and a plot all-too-reminiscent of Arthur Crabtree’s Fiend without a Face–has been done so many times, a majority of which so poorly as to make any guess as to the director’s actual referent tricky, its external tagline comes directly from Castle’s House on Haunted Hill: a skeleton dubbed the “Emergo,” which was cast into the audience during the proceedings, only this time as appearing as a gargantuan bloodsucking insect. Jack Pollexfen’s notoriously bad Indestructible Man, which houses one of Lon Chaney Junior’s worst performances, is mocked in the second feature as the “Percepto” from Castle’s The Tingler makes its timely return. Lastly, with “The Stench,” a comical tongue-in-cheek jibe at poorly overdubbed Japanese horror features, the filmmaker departs from his celluloid entrepreneur of choice as Jack Cardiff’s “Smell-O-Vision” from Scent of Mystery is lovingly refashioned. However, Castle purists can rest easy for the Herrier’s first theater-filling device, life insurance policies upon admission into Macabre, opens the revelry.
Yet the allusions, either in visual or verbal form, don’t even begin to end here for the film-within-a-film, “Possessor,” is a spoof upon Harold Warren’s Manos: The Hands of Fate, shot in a manner not unlike the almost equally decrepit The Screaming Skull by Alex Nicol, which–for you horror trolls–is the notorious production which Castle “borrowed” his idea for audience life-insurance (the films were released a scant ten months apart–no one will ever claim that Castle exhibited ready tact). But, alas, eight-two months before Matthew Lillard would referentially utter “I’ll be right back,” Maggie notes that, not only her dreams (which have become reality) would an apt movie make, but the scenario in which she is involved, Popcorn proper, would also make for fair-to-maudlin cinematic fare as well. But what can be said of the double entendre of a killer who looks at his watch and, deciding he can spare a moment between victims, sardonically declares that he “Still [has] a little time to kill”?
However, for all of the logistic mayhem invested in the picture from people responsible for such films as Black Christmas, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, Dead of Night, Deranged, and the admirable remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, Herrier’s preoccupation–albeit exquisitely executed–with his antagonist, if spread throughout the whole of the feature, might have resulted in a film which wouldn’t have been relegated to second-run theaters due to poor box office returns following its release. Indeed, the portrayal and presentation of the killer all-but-demands a new horror icon but, alas, if Hannibal Lecter would have found himself amid Alone in the Dark, I highly doubt we’d know his name. It doesn’t help that Popcorn is fraught with continuity errors but, at that, blaring ones.
So, is Mark Herrier’s Popcorn worth watching? Indeed, for two reasons. One, the playful, yet masterfully controlled, postmodern pandemonium that is Alan Ormsby’s script and, two, the wonderful, delectable “almost” that is the film’s resident psycho. Yet, be forewarned, by viewing the feature, one might very well feel inclined to write the director who spoiled what could have very well become the legacy of one of the late 20th century’s greatest horror icons. It is not often that audiences demand a remake but, in Popcorn’s case, we can only pray that, if we get our wish, it is conducted by someone who can do justice to a work twice over.
-Egregious Gurnow
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
