'Popeye's Revenge' Review
Image Source: IGN
As a certain golden droid from Star Wars said, "Here we go again."
I’ve watched horror pretty consistently for roughly sixteen years now. From ancient silent films to modern movies in theaters, I’ve run the gamut of the genre. When I started really watching slashers in college, I noticed that slashers in particular go through ages. The first age had the proto-slashers, such as the Bava films, Psycho, and Peeping Tom. The second was the true golden age, bringing us such classics as Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, the many, many, many sequels to those films, and the hundreds of other smaller slashers that made the meat of the age. The third age was the meta age, giving us films that deconstructed the genre, most notably Scream. Now we’re in another age: the age of the childhood killer. It started with Blood and Honey, and it has only gone downhill from there, with films ranging from “eh, decent enough for what they are” to “this has no value, and it was made to capitalize on Blood and Honey’s success.” This latest offering is an example of the latter.
For whatever reason, we’re getting several different Popeye slasher films, and this is one of the first.
Released at the beginning of 2025, the story follows several teenagers, one of whom inherits Popeye’s old childhood home, who are trying to turn the property into a summer camp. Death follows. And… yeah, that’s it. What are their names? Google tells me that the protagonist is called Tara. Does she or any of the rest of them have any depth? Anything that makes them remotely interesting? Nope. They are the perfect examples of “people who are only here to die a bloody death, and the final girl.”
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Image Source: Movieplayer
Are the kills at least decent? Eh. There’s definitely blood and guts. Popeye doesn’t go halfway in his killings, and utilizes his strength and various deadly objects to create much death. However, the kills aren’t as fun as they could be, since the characters are so flat and uninteresting. Without a reason to care about the characters, they’re not really all that fun. For a perfect example of what I mean, take Glen from the original Nightmare on Elm Street. He has one of the best deaths in all of slasherdom, and the impact is heightened because he has an interesting character, and we want to see him survive. There’s no reason to care about any of these characters, so when Popeye kills one of them, there’s a brief jolt of “ooh, that’s a lot of blood”, but without interesting characters, they’re not memorable.
The film also suffers from technical issues. These types of films could be improved if they hired a good sound mixer. As is typical, the sound effects and music often drown out the dialogue.
The biggest sin of this film, however, is that it’s just plain boring. There’s nothing in there that we haven’t seen from a thousand other slashers like it. If it wasn’t one of the three Popeye slashers released at the beginning of 2025, it would have nothing to pique your interest. Even with that, there’s nothing to really pique your interest anyway. I’ve been hoping that I’ll find a good one of these ever since I saw the first Blood and Honey, and its sequel is the closest thing I’ve found. This one certainly didn’t fit the bill, as Cinemasins would say…
Skip!
Rating: 0/10
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