Popcorn

Popcorn follows a teacher (Tony Roberts’ Mr. Davis) and his students (including Jill Schoelen’s Maggie and Tom Villard’s Toby) as they stage an all-night horror movie marathon to raise money, with horror ensuing after a mysterious figure begins knocking off the aforementioned teacher and students one by one. There’s ultimately very little within Popcorn that wholeheartedly (or even partially) works, as the movie progresses at an unreasonably deliberate pace and contains few elements worth embracing – with the less-than-engrossing atmosphere compounded by a distinct (and disappointing) lack of gore. The uneventful first act gives way to a padded-out midsection that spends far too much time on the gimmicky horror-marathon movies, and it’s clear, too, that the emphasis on Schoelen’s investigation into the killer’s identity and her own past only perpetuates the almost aggressively tedious vibe. And though Schoelen delivers a decent, sympathetic performance and director Mark Herrier offers up a very small handful of compelling sequences (the killer executes one of his victims using a makeshift electric chair), Popcorn is ultimately nothing less than a disastrously misguided and misbegotten trainwreck of a horror movie.

* out of ****