#derek rydall

Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989)

"Eric... I'm really sorry. Look, I may have made some mistakes, I said some bad things. I'll eat my words!"

I hate this movie with my whole heart. It isn't just that it's obnoxious, inauthentic, unfunny, and not scary; it's that it insults me as someone who loves movies. It's a personal attack that weaponizes my favorite thing in the world against me, and I can't forgive it. This condescending wankfest poses as an homage to William Castle and the glory days of the gimmick, but POPCORN's B-movie impressions have none of the zany charm of that kind of filmmaking, and its Castle-esque gimmicks are so complex and unwieldy as to totally defy the original idea of making money from nothing. Few things are worse than an homage that doesn't show any real understanding the reference material.

This movie doesn't deserve this great poster.

Jill Schoelen does her very best with the character of Maggie Butler, an irritating film nerd who lets us know she's a film nerd by name dropping Orson Welles for no reason, and hustling around acting very busy with a movie that's just a direct translation of her dream journal. She's even too busy to fuck her mouth-breathing boyfriend Mark (Derek Rydall), whose sexual frustration is his only characteristic. Soon Maggie is busier still, when her classmate Toby (Tom Villard) proposes that they and the other film dorks put on an all-night movie marathon to raise funds for their university's film department. They somehow stage this event in a condemned movie palace with the help of quirky old Dr. Mnesyne (Ray Walston, who the film tries to force you to love in the smarmiest way possible), who turns up with trunks full of old props to help drum up publicity. The marathon is a gigantic success, but during the night, the dorks are picked off by a killer in disguise—a refugee from a massacred "movie cult"—who holds the key to Maggie's apparently mysterious past.

This is not Maggie, but...???

Without even getting into Maggie's convoluted origins and how her destiny is intertwined with the killer's, there's a lot of stuff about POPCORN that just doesn't make any sense to me. If the film department is so impoverished, how does this huge project get authorized? Why, and actually how, would the school allow students to operate in a decaying building that's on the verge of being razed to the ground? (Hopefully these plucky kids have all had their shots) How does a group of college students (especially Maggie who is so very busy) find the time and resources to refurb an entire movie theater, outfitting it with complex systems like this movie's version of Odorama, which blasts the audience with billowing, opaque clouds of noxious gas? How are the movie goers supposed to see through this fog, and how are they supposed to see around some of the costumes dispersed throughout the audience, which have gigantic rubber heads and other sight line-obscuring appendages? When the power goes out in the theater, what's going on with the swirling spotlights, mics, and amps used by the awful reggae band that's supposed to keep everybody entertained? And if most of these props are supposed to be original, like from the golden age of B-movie ballyhoo, why the fuck are they so complicated, like the gigantic movie-quality mosquito that, instead of just being drawn across the house by pulleys like William Castle's Emergo skeletons, is operated with a high tech remote control?

I promise I would kill anyone who sat in front of me in a movie theater with that jumbo fright wig on the left or that big rubber fake head on the right.

OK OK, so we're supposed to understand that the killer has outfitted the mosquito with remote control capabilities, but…it just doesn't make any sense that this should even be possible with an ancient advertising prop. And this problem connects with what really bothers me about this movie: its basic misunderstanding of the form of production that POPCORN supposedly-lovingly sends up. The gang are using materials that Dr. Mnesyne has preserved from back in the day, but stuff from back in the day would be way cheaper and simpler than this. The point was to make money without spending money that you didn't have in the first place. Cardboard axes for STRAIT-JACKET. Seatbelts added to the "Shock Section" of theaters playing I SAW WHAT YOU DID. Fake life insurance policies lest anyone die of fright during MACABRE. A flimsy yellow "Coward's Corner" booth for anyone who was too scared to watch the end of HOMICIDAL. The most high tech thing you might encounter were the Percepto seat buzzers that went off during a key moment in THE TINGLER, but you can hardly imagine a dedicated Percepto operator sitting at an elaborate switchboard in an opera box, hand-selecting victims in the theater below like you see in POPCORN.

While the gimmicks here are crazily luxurious compared to the real deal, the movies in POPCORN's meta marathon are very deliberately limp, dry, and stupid. The audience is only there to laugh, sneer, and throw shit, which is the most miserable thing I can think of as somebody who loves movies. Imagine being trapped in a theater filled with people who think that being incredibly rude and hateful is all it takes to be as witty as the cast of MST3K? Where this film really has its wires crossed is, the Castle movies were both cheap AND good, or at the very least, entertaining on their own virtues. Even "the worst movie ever made", PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, is creative and unpredictable, with wild dialog delivered wildly by certain stars. Many of the low budget movies that people would actually come out for in the slavering droves you see in POPCORN had more going for them than wooden acting, laughable effects, and bad writing. But, that's all you see in POPCORN: bad imitations of bad movies, and bad people laughing at them sadistically. You'd never know what's supposed to be enjoyable about the B- or even Z-movie experience, in all its campy, unhinged glory, from the shitty situation set up by Maggie and her friends. The gimmicks are way too overblown, and the movies are so bad they only invite cruelty from viewers. Like…why are we doing this, you guys?

The point of the rubber head above is that when the wearer leans over, it dumps a pint of neon green "vomit" onto the ground (so make sure no one is standing next to you I guess). But I have questions about that, like, does the guy have to reset the thing every single time he does the gag? Can he only do it once? Is this possibly worth the effort? It seems like a huge pain in the ass all the way around.

Somehow POPCORN is even worse when it occasionally does things I wish I could enjoy. The "movie cult" of which the killer was once part made a psychedelic snuff film that we catch intriguing glimpses of, partially filtered through the bizarre dreams that plague Maggie's nights. Some of the special effects are decent, too, and the performers are really doing their best for the most part (including a sadly squandered Dee Wallace). There was some kind of potential here, but it all gets gobbled up by anonymous characters, demanding leaps of logic, brutally unfunny jokes, infantile music, and what can feel like an antagonistic attitude toward film itself. By blowing everything out of proportion in its shallow attempt at homage, it feels like POPCORN is saying, "The original gimmicks were so stupid we had to upgrade them until they're unrecognizable, and the original movies were so stupid that you can only enjoy them by treating them like punching bags." The logical conclusion of which is, "If you like any of that old stuff for what it was, you're an idiot." Not a great thing to hear. I don't feel like getting into the story of this movie's tortured production, but let's just say that it didn't surprise me to hear that it was as hard to make this movie as it is to watch it, effectively ending the relationship between creative partners Alan Ormsby and Bob Clark, and creating various miseries for the others. You can always tell when there's some joy missing at the heart of a film, and that is never clearer than when the film is supposedly about people who love film. Hopefully this is the last time I watch POPCORN.

Derek Rydall, Emergence: The End of Self Improvement