I yam what I yam
uh guh guh guh guh
That’s all I can stands, an’ I can’t stands no more!
No, these aren’t the ramblings of a smelly drunk sat against a wall outside of your local dive bar, those are classic Popeye quotes! Popeye is the newest addition to the public domain, which means it was an arms-race, or a forearms-race if you will, to be the first to market with a Popeye-centered horror film, and since we live in the darkest timeline, that means we got three Popeye films in one year: Popeye’s Revenge, Popeye the Slayer Man, and Shiver Me Timbers. And I watched them all.
The first film up in my marathon was Popeye the Slayer Man (2025). Visually, it takes a lot of its color-grading from the Saw franchise (derogatory), heavy in the blues and greens, washing out all other colors. We open with the threat of sexual violence, which is always a bad sign for a film. I know you want to hook your audience up front, especially since this was straight-to-streaming, but there’s so many better ways to do that than having two men chase down a woman to rape and probably kill her. Luckily, our intrepid villain shows up just in time to disembowel and crush our two would-be criminals before giving us a forced exchange between the woman and our sailor,
you’re a monster!
I yam… what I yam…
The film follows a young documentarian, Dexter, and his friends who investigate the abandoned Anchor Bay Canning warehouse that is soon to be demolished by Lex, a local financial titan. Dexter and his friends are your typical horror archetypes; he’s the nerdy filmmaker, Olivia is your sad girl with a mysterious past, you have the horny couple, there’s Katie, the meek girl with her abusive boyfriend Joey (who kind of looks like Jacob Elordi) and the abusive boyfriend’s cronies.
Despite all of the warning signs ahead of them, the film crew enters the building and splits up so they can set up cameras and be dispatched by Popeye one-by-one. Dexter and Olivia find out Lex owns the building and the newspaper (big development down the line), the horny couple finds a secluded place to be horny, and Joey shows up to the warehouse because he doesn’t trust Katie around the crew. Popeye finds Katie and chases her, they both run into Joey and his friends. Joey attempts to kill Popeye, but has an itchy trigger finger and shoots Katie instead, leaving her for dead.
Meanwhile, the horny couple is chased by Popeye and both get impaled on exposed rebar, which was a big laugh in my house. Dexter and Olivia do some digging and find out Popeye was mutated by radioactive spinach, and poor Olive Oyl was killed after blowing the whistle on the whole crooked operation. Olivia seems shaken up by this because… she’s Popeye’s daughter.
In the final showdown, Joey has gone Jack Nicholson in The Shining-level crazy and is about to kill everyone before Popeye rips off Joey’s arm and beats him to death with it. Dexter and Olivia escape to find Katie still alive, and still bleeding. In a post credits scene, we see Lex at the warehouse, who gets his head crushed by Popeye, then we’re treated to an end credits theme. I’m a sucker for a poppy song that plays over the end credits and recaps the film for us, so the film gets a whole point bump for that.
It’s not good, obviously, but it’s a fun watch. I imagine this one would be a good ‘movie night’ with friends where everyone is yelling at the TV by the end. It takes itself seriously, which I actually appreciate in these slashers, because so many of these low-budget slashers think they’re so fucking funny and clever. It’s never the case; it’s never as funny as the filmmaker thinks. The SFX is practical for the most part, and pretty effective. There’s plenty of kills for you horror hounds; scalpings, multiple head crushes, the aforementioned disemboweling, beatings, impalings, just about everything you could hope for.
Next up for us was Shiver me Timbers (2025). This one was a rough watch. It opens with a block of text stating that “This story is based on real events and depicts real murders”. This is a trend I’m absolutely tired of. The Cohen brothers get a pass for Fargo because they’re actually funny. This is a British production, I only mention because these poor Brits are desperately trying to choke back their accents and it’s the only (ironically) enjoyable thing about this film.
We’re introduced to a group of friends that drive out to the countryside to see Halley’s comet as it passes by earth. On their way to the campground, they nearly run over a fisherman on his way to his boat who warns them that strange things happen during meteor showers. What could that possibly mean? They make their way through the woods to their spot and do an insane amount of drugs, as teens in slashers do. We also have our slasher teens; the main character, the fat one, the horny couple, etc.
The meteor shower starts, and the fisherman is in his boat for a little midnight fishing(?). The meteor burns up in the atmosphere and lands exactly in the fisherman’s pipe, morphing him into an AI generated nightmare (ooo spooky, even our low-budget films are being invaded by AI). His face is all CG which had to have been more expensive than simply casting a homely old man.
This is literally a still of the Popeye-esque character from the film.
Following slasher rules, our teens split up to find their friend who went to relieve himself and Popeye goes on a killing spree. The first to get it is our fat friend, who is killed while taking the longest and messiest shit ever (seriously, we sit with him in an outhouse for a minute-long shitting scene). Popeye add insult to injury when he literally shits down his throat.
The next to get it is the horny couple, and I’m gonna need a diagram to help me on this one. Popeye has this femur bone he’s turned into a pipe (this is important). The couple is in a tent together, man on top, when Popeye finds them. We cut to the girl telling the guy it’s too much, and we pull out (the shot, people, get your heads out of the gutter) to reveal the femur is now protruding from the guy’s mouth and Popeye is thrusting an arm through him. Are we supposed to assume that it was shoved all the way through his body it came out his mouth? I just need someone to hold my hand and explain it to me.
Corpses are found, more friends are killed (one by a stray meteor), and Ollie is the last alive. She meets a Vietnam vet who introduces her to his homemade weapon, a giant sawblade. Ollie gets a hold of the comet ember and adds it to the sawblade battery source (you just gotta go with the movie, it really jumps the shark here) and uses it to supercharge the sawblade. She fights Popeye in a scene that can only be described as a Mortal Kombat cut scene and kills him in a way that can only be described as, “a complete ripoff of the Evil Dead remake”. Then, in case you didn’t get it, Ollie looks to the camera and says,
Groovy.
And we’re treated to a victory lap over the credits. For those uninitiated, and in the case that this is a term I’ve just completely made up, a victory lap is when a film plays a clip of each actor next to their respective credit. It’s an incredibly self-indulgent sequence and is particularly grating when it’s in a movie that hasn’t earned it. This film leans hard into the comedy and fails miserably. It’s cheap, forgettable, and its use of AI really bugged me.
After some soul searching, and asking if I truly hate myself, I watched Popeye’s Revenge. This one is more of a Jason Voorhees type slasher. It opens with an animated intro where Popeyes big forearms are a birth deformity. He’s teased by children, loses it and nearly kills a kid with his superhuman strength. He’s chased down by the townspeople and drowned in the bottom of a river. We cut to two another group of people filming at the lake where Popeye was murdered, only to be murdered themselves when Popeye shows up.
After the cold open, we’re introduced to yet another smattering of teen slasher archetypes. Our final girl has inherited Popeye’s old house and keeping in theme with the Jason idea, plans to turn it into a summer camp with the help of her friends (who don’t seem to like her very much, but still made the twelve hour drive into the middle of nowhere). But in this film, Popeye has an accomplice: Olive, a mysterious ‘tweaker’ (the film’s term, not mine). With her help, he dispatches the teens, somewhat gruesomely.
In an incredibly late exposition dump, we learn that the final girl’s mother was Popeye’s teacher (gasp!) and our final girl was the only classmate that took pity on poor Popeye. His accomplice is revealed to be his sister, Olive. Now, as we all know, Popeye is an avid gardener, which is why it should come as no surprise that Popeye is run over by a commercial lawnmower. In classic Jason Voorhees fashion, Popeye comes back from death to grab our final girl before cutting to black.
I’m going to be honest with you all. I fell asleep several times during this one and refused to go back to catch up on any minor plot details. I left out this subplot involving a love triangle with a man who’s more of a monster than the literal monster in the film. I have no problem wasting my time to watch these films once, but I’m not going back. I hope you’ll all forgive me.
The kills in this film seem almost improvised. There’s a kill where Popeye kills a girl in a hot tub. He tries ripping her head off with his signature(?) anchor, which fails. He then grabs at her breasts before drowning her in the pool. The other kills are equally confounding and underwhelming. In fact, the whole plot is confusing and underbaked.
We’re in a golden era of slasher movies; In a Violent Nature, Happy Death Day, The Strangers, Terrifier, etc. They’re all films that have indelibly left their mark on the sub-genre and changed the game for films to follow in their wake. The good films are great, and the bad are excruciating.
I think these public domain horror films are more of a symptom than a sign of a trend. We are seeing more requels, legacy sequels, and remakes every year. And we’re running out of films to mine for more content. I mean, who really wanted an I Know What You Did Last Summer requel after we rebooted the series in 2021? We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel and the result of this creative bankrupt society is three Popeye horror films in 2025. I grew up in the 90s/00s and if I had to watch Popeye cartoons, it was a desperate move. No one was clamoring for more Popeye content, and no one was begging for more Steamboat Willy Mickey Mouse content either. But since this is the trend, these films get pushed to the top of the list over original ideas.
It would be a different story if the filmmakers spent any time developing an original visual style or if the writers tried to do something out of the box. Tthen these films would at least have a purpose; to be a springboard to produce an original idea, a passion project. But all three are plug-and-play formulas, and it’s not to berate the filmmakers; I’m sure every one of these films were rushed so they could be the first Popeye movie on Tubi.
We’re not out of the woods either. Over the next twenty years, Goofy, Donald Duck, Batman, and Superman are all entering the public domain; I’m no psychic, but I know each one will receive their own slasher film and I’ll go as far as to say someone will make a ‘slasher cinematic universe’ with Mickey, Donald, and Goofy. Just don’t shoot the messenger on this one.
ratings:
Popeye the slayer man: 2/5
Shiver me Timbers: 0.5/5 (Yes, that’s 0.5)
Popeye’s Revenge: 1/5
Who should watch these ‘films’?
- Absolutely no one
