POPEYE’S REVENGE (2025)

Streaming on Tubi from ITN Studios!
Directed by William Stead.
Written by Harry Boxley, E.C. Segar.
Check out the trailer here!!

A boy named Popeye was born with deformed arms. Bullied by his classmates, Popeye fought back, accidentally killing one of the boys. Soon, the townsfolk turned into an angry mob, the torch bearing kind, who burn down Popeye’s house, kill his parents, and chase him to a lake where he drowned. But ever since then, when the fog rolls in, Popeye rises from the lake to take revenge upon anyone near his old house. Years later, Tara (Emily Mogilner) and her friends plan to renovate Popeye’s old house, cash in on the legend, and make it a haunt attraction. Of course, that clears the way for Popeye to sail in for some vengeance.

POPEYE’S REVENGE zags when you think it’s going to zig by ignoring anything about the origins of Popeye and clumsily managing to smoosh the origins of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger together to make the blandest slasher flick one can imagine. I know these are cheaply and quickly made as soon as some producer finds out a character has gone into public domain, but would it kill the writers to add some distinguishing characteristics from the Popeye cartoon in the script? Nothing about POPEYE’S REVENGE save for the fact that the killer looks like a live-action Popeye has to do with the cartoon, which leads me to question why the hell was this movie made in the first place. I imagine this slasher script had been gathering dust for years and Popeye was injected into it at the last minute.

As a slasher, POPEYE’S REVENGE is mundane. Sure, there are a few brutal kills and I actually through the pencil drawings in the beginning were kind of fun, but none of the characters are worth giving a fig about. The entire cast has one characteristic to play with and very little else is added. There’s the cheating dude, his girlfriend, his lover, the pothead, the girl who’s not interested in him, and the righteous couple with good intentions. And that’s about all of the fleshing out they get, though two of them hang around in bikinis, and you get to see one’s tits. And of course, they all die in familiar, yet gruesome ways. As a positive, I guess, there is one scene where Popeye grabs a woman by her breast and her breast implant pops which is something I can say I’ve never seen before.

Looky-looky, we’ve got Harry Boxley as one of the writers for POPEYE’S REVENGE. You might remember Boxley wrote not one, but two Steamboat Willie films, the passable MOUSEBOAT MASSACRE and the wretched MOUSE OF HORRORS, along with other fairy tale films like the okay MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB, a few films I haven’t seen FAIREST OF THEM ALL, CINDERELLA’S CURSE, HOOK, and one I’ll be covering next time on Public Domain horrors, PIGLET. Boxley seems to be the guy to go to when you want to make a Public Domain or fairy tale horror movie that barely resembles the property and trying to quote unquote pay homage to.

POPEYE’S REVENGE is another plopper. Director William Stead is working on a new film already, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST CHRISTMAS, and you know I’ll be all over that one when it is released. POPEYE’S REVENGE is made by the production team behind the WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY shared universe but is not a part of that shared universe. Which I guess is a good thing, because this one’s another dud as far as anything creative accomplished now that Popeye is public domain.