Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Popcorn (1991)

IMDb plot summary: A master of disguise deranged killer begins killing off the college students who are organizing a horror-movie marathon in an abandoned theater.
Directed by Mark Herrier. Starring Jill Schoelen, Tom Villard, Dee Wallace, and Derek Rydall.

Popcorn tells the story of a group of film students who decide to put on a horror movie festival. As they prepare, they find a creepy film that was the precursor to a murder several years ago, and then... someone connected to that film and those murders comes back to make the film festival horrific as well. It's hard to succinctly describe the plot because so much of it circles around just a vague *sense* that something is wrong for about half the movie. One girl is having weird dreams, there's a weird old movie, Mom is getting creepy phone calls... It doesn't really gel until much later in the film, and even then whether it makes any sense is questionable. The most enjoyable piece of this actually is the series of films-within-a-film that is the group's horrorthon. We see short segments of delightfully tropey B-movies made up for the film, all of which purportedly came with a theatrical gimmick like pumping bad smells into the theater or vibrating the seats, and as the film group attempts to recreate those gimmicks, it does feel like a really enjoyable nostalgia trip. The actual story outside these mini-films is far less engaging (and often just kinda gross) but there are some fun moments here.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Popcorn < Poulenc: Dialogues des Carmelites
Popcorn > Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
Popcorn > Grace of Monaco
Popcorn < The Deer Hunter
Popcorn > Withnail & I
Popcorn > Event Horizon
Popcorn < Interstate 60
Popcorn > Wedding Crashers
Popcorn > Peter Pan Live!
Popcorn < Camp Rock
Popcorn < The Commitments
Popcorn > Horror of Dracula
Final spot: #1867 out of 3265, or 43%.

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