The Dark Séance: Saturday Night at the Movies, Who Cares What Picture Ya See…

I have written a lot about Mark Herrier’s 1991 slasher Popcorn in this column, for reasons that are relatively obvious to anyone who has seen it. Popcorn is about a group of film students who are trying to raise funds for their class by staging an all-night horrorthon at an abandoned movie palace that’s about to be torn down.

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The three movies they have planned for their film fest are all “turkeys – and not even fresh turkeys,” but they each have one thing going for them: they were originally released with a gimmick, and the film class plans to recreate each of those three gimmicks live and in person in the auditorium of the Dreamland theater.

The three films are pure hokum, dreamed up by the creative team behind Popcorn itself, sampling from wells as varied as 50s big bug movies and overdubbed Japanese imports, but the three gimmicks are mostly pulled from the oeuvre of William Castle. Let’s take a look at the lineup, shall we?

Mosquito is a send-up of 50s atomic panic movies, about a giant mosquito mutated by exposure to radiation and ultimately destroyed by an A-bomb. Not only is it shown in 3D (complete with branded Mosquito glasses), but it borrows the Emergo gimmick from House on Haunted Hill – though in this case it’s a big mosquito, rather than a skeleton, that flies over the audience on wires.

The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man takes its cue from the spate of amazing, incredible, and so on projected, transparent, colossal, melting, and indestructible men who haunted the B-sides of drive-in double bills. In this case, Bruce Glover (father of Crispin) plays a convict executed in the electric chair who survives with high-voltage powers. It is accompanied by “Shock-O-Scope,” which is a variation on The Tingler’s Percepto. Except in this case, “Shock-O-Scope” actually does what people just thought Percepto did, and delivers electric shocks to various seats throughout the theater.

Finally, The Stench is an overdubbed Japanese production in the tradition of such films as The H-Man (1958) and The Human Vapor (1960). Unlike the other two, its gimmick (“Aroma-Rama,” not “Odorama” as I had mischaracterized it in a previous column) isn’t borrowed from Castle, and instead comes courtesy of the original AromaRama and Smell-O-Vision gimmicks.

Nor does Popcorn stop with the three (really four) gimmicks accompanying its three imaginary features. The students put up a skeletal “Shock Clock” in the lobby, reminiscent of the ticking funeral clock that opens William Castle’s Macabre, or the “Fright Break” in his Homicidal, not to mention numerous theater-specific gimmicks, such as the swinging pendulum marquee that accompanied one theater’s exhibition of Pit and the Pendulum.

One of them dresses as a nurse in the lobby and has attendees sign “Fright Forms” saying that the exhibitors aren’t responsible “if you drop dead,” while another wears a strait jacket and warns people not to go in, screaming, “I saw the Horrorthon and look at me now!” The audience members are seen carrying vomit bags, in a nod to the gimmicks of films such as Mark of the Devil (1970) and I Dismember Mama (1972).

Oddly enough, while Popcorn borrows heavily from the gimmicks of William Castle, none of its movie-within-a-movie films resemble his work, and his name is rarely if ever mentioned in the commentary tracks or the feature-length making-of documentary that accompany Popcorn on Blu-ray.

Where do these ostensibly broke film students get all this stuff? From Dr. Mnesyne, a former theater owner who now runs a movie memorabilia shop. Dr. M (a nod to the American title of Black Pit of Dr. M, 1959? Unlikely, but not impossible) is played by none other than Ray Walston, an actual artifact of old-time Hollywood who might well have starred in the movies that these kids are showing – today, he may be best known for the titular role in the sitcom My Favorite Martian.

Before turning over his treasure trove of movie memorabilia to them, Dr. Mnesyne gives a speech about the kind of atmosphere they’re trying to recreate. “The ballyhoo, the giveaways… the bullshit.” He then disappears from the picture, never to be seen again. Even his unusual name seems like a nod to Mnemosyne, the Greek Titan who was the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses.

Oddly enough, the release of Popcorn itself was accompanied by no gimmicks that I’m aware of, though it does mark an early instance of the self-aware meta horror that was about to become all the rage in films such as Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996).

Indeed, Popcorn likely almost didn’t get released at all. Financed by a Toronto real estate developer and filmed almost entirely in Kingston, Jamaica, Popcorn had nearly as much going on behind the scenes as the film’s own horrorthon does.

Originally intended as a directing vehicle for Bob Clark (Black Christmas), Clark handed it off to screenwriter Alan Ormsby, ostensibly because he was moving into more mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, and didn’t want his name on another horror picture.

Clark and Ormsby had worked together before, on such films as Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) and Deathdream (1974). Popcorn would have been Ormsby’s solo directorial debut (he had previously co-directed the Ed Gein flick Deranged with Jeff Gillen in 1974.)

However, Ormsby was off the set in a matter of weeks, allegedly because he spent too much time (and too much of the movie’s budget) lovingly recreating the various film-within-a-film gimmick pictures. When he went, so too did original lead Amy O’Neil (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), replaced with up-and-coming scream queen Jill Schoelen (The Stepfather, Cutting Class, etc.).

Ormsby was replaced by Mark Herrier, an actor with no other directing credits to his name. According to many, however, Bob Clark “remained extremely hands-on throughout principal photography, even picking up the camera to handle 2nd unit directing when needed,” leading some to speculate that Clark deserves credit as effectively a third director in the film’s muddled production.