Thoughts on Popcorn

     Through Le Cinéma Club, a weekly online newsletter that streams one film a week, rotating films every week, I watched Popcorn, a 1991 slasher horror film directed by Mark Herrier and written by Alan Ormsby. The film is centered around a group of college film students, who decide to hold a film festival on campus as a fundraiser for the film department, and they choose 1950s-1960s-era B-movies that are fake movies within the movies, meant to be homages to actual 1950s B-movie auteurs like Jack Arnold (It Came From Outer Space; The Incredible Shrinking Man), William Castle (The Tingler; House on Haunted Hill), and Japanese monster movies dubbed over in English for the U.S. market, like the Godzilla series.

    The film's protagonist is Maggie (Jill Schoelen), a film student and screenwriter who has recurring nightmares of a girl named Sarah caught in a fire and chased by an attacker. She writes notes about these dreams, hoping to use them in a film. But when the film students are looking at films to use in the festival, one of them is a short cult film called Possessor, and the images resemble her dreams, and the film professor (Tony Roberts) tells the students that the film was made by Lanyard Gates, who killed his family onstage while the film screened and then set the theater on fire. Maggie asks her mother Suzanne (Dee Wallace) about the film, who feigns ignorance about it and tries to get Maggie to quit the festival, saying that her ambition was adorable at age 8, it was inspiring at age 18, but at age 28, it's embarrassing. She then receives a threatening phone call, hinting that Suzanne knows more than she is letting on.

    Throughout the film festival, the audience is packed, and the film students have set up fun gimmicks to go off during the screenings, like electrified seats a la The Tingler (as William Castle would put buzzers on seats to go off during key moments of the film to give audience members a thrill) and a giant mosquito prop to fly around on wires during the fictional 3-D film Mosquito. But as the festival goes on, a masked and deranged killer wears different masks to murder the professor and several of the film students, disguising his kills with the movie gimmicks so the audience will think it's part of the show.

    I really liked this movie. I thought it was a lot of fun, mixing in tributes to actual B-movies with the fictional movies-within-a-movie, and recognized the actor Barry Jenner alongside his real-life wife Suzanne Hunt in Mosquito, knowing him as Lt. Murtaugh, Carl Winslow's cop partner on Family Matters. I liked the "getting the festival ready" montage with the song "Saturday Night at the Movies" by the 1960s group The Drifters, adding in some charm. 

    And I especially liked Jill Schoelen as the lead, who dressed in an early 1990s alternative thrift store look, and reminded me of both Winona Ryder and Krysten Ritter. She is retired now, but acted as a "scream queen" in horror films of the 1980s and 1990s like The Chiller, The Stepfather, Cutting Class, and The Phantom of the Opera. She was very cute and carried the film well with a lot of talent and charisma.

    I did like the reveal of the killer, and the makeup and special effects involved in their reveal were really great, and the reveal made sense with the story and wasn't tacked on.

    I'm glad I checked this out, this film felt like the kind of horror film that I would like, with cinephiles and self-awareness about old horror films and the styles of past B-movies, as well as celebrating the communal experience of watching these films at the theater with like-minded geeks.