POPCORN

Directed by Mark Herrier. 1991. United States.

Mark Herrier’s pop slasher POPCORN deserves a mention in any serious conversation about the roots of meta-horror films. It’s a slasher set in a movie theater, the current venue for a one-night-only horror movie marathon thrown by a college movie class. The kids have rigged the theater using gimmicks not unlike those used by William Castle. A giant mosquito on a zipline, electric shocks attached to the seats, foul-smelling odor capsules… All the classics, set up and ready to give the shockingly large audience a night they’ll never forget.

Unfortunately, it’s also a night most of our cast won’t make it through alive. You see, many years ago in this very theater, a deranged cult director (literally; the guy was a cult leader who made movies) named Lanyard Gates tried to kill his family while filming the climax of his avant-garde short film, Possessor. In the resulting chaos, the theater was set on fire. In typical horror movie fashion, the director’s body was never found. Our young lead, Maggie (played by the always wonderful Jill Schoelen), has been having nightmares recently. Unbeknownst to her until now, those nightmares aren’t just fodder for her new screenplay, but repressed memories of the night she survived the Lanyard Gates incident.

Now, someone, maybe Gates himself, is stalking her and bumping off her classmates one by one. It’s up to Maggie and her clumsy boyfriend, Mark, to figure out who is after her before it's too blah blah blah. Look, the plot isn’t important here. What’s important is how POPCORN feels. From its light-hearted scares to its loving embrace of everything camp and corny about horror, POPCORN is perfect Saturday afternoon fare. Provided, of course, you’re willing to overlook some of its more pernicious and frankly idiotic idiosyncracies.

For example, why did our leads hire a reggae band to play at the theater? How is this reggae band performing at all when they’re only brought to the stage once the theater loses power? Are we really to believe that college kids in 1991 would attend an all-night screening of 1950s sci-fi/horror films? Our killer is a burn victim whose face was reduced to a pulp, yet they can wear masks made from lifecasts of their victims and appear exactly like them, despite not utilizing any prosthetics underneath the latex. The film has zero supernatural elements to it, yet an early scene with Dee Wallace at the theater shows letters flying off the marquee, words forming out of nothing, doors opening, and a ticket printing, all without human agency.

Yeah, I don’t care about any of that. I care about a young college screenwriter having corny horror movie dreams and then seriously saying to her mother, “I wonder if Orson Welles dreamed about Citizen Kane first, too” as if they're comparable. I care about people in a college film class arguing over what had more social significance, POLICE ACADEMY or the entire Bergman filmography. I care about the loving recreations of 1950s schlock movies. If you don’t get serious SCREAM 2 flashbacks watching the killer stage a recreation of the ending of Possessor in front of a screaming audience of kids too clueless to realize this isn’t part of the show, I don’t know what to tell you. POPCORN is gloriously, madly in love with movies. It adores the moviegoing experience and all that it entails.

Look, there’s nothing groundbreaking or even particularly grand about how POPCORN goes about doing the same old slasher routine. Complaining about that feels bad faith because, honestly, POPCORN isn’t trying to break new ground. If anything, it’s celebrating every trope, cliche, and stupid gimmick there is. It’s not trying to be overly scary. In fact, if it wasn’t for a couple of giant mosquito impalements, there’s no reason this couldn’t be a PG-13 horror flick. It’s also much funnier than I remember it being, with several running gags that actually work. The performances are high-energy, the stakes are low, the camp is turned up to 11, and everywhere you look is some kind of memorabilia or movie poster that makes you want to smile. For a slasher movie, it feels positively endearing.

It’s a likable film, one that doesn’t demand anything of you other than 90 minutes of your life. It’s not gonna scare your pants off or satiate your bloodlust, but put it on as a double feature with Joe Dante’s MATINEE, and you have yourself a damn fine afternoon. I love movies that love movies, that celebrate tropes instead of finger-wagging at them. No one involved with POPCORN thought they were making some new American movie classic. They all understood the assignment and passed the test with flying colors.