POPEYE'S REVENGE (2025)

Studio:   ITN Distribution
Director: William Stead
Writer:   Harry Boxley
Producer: Rene August
Stars:    Emily Rose Mogilner, Connor Powles, Danielle Roland, Danielle Scott, Amanda Jane York, Oliver Mason, Kathi DeCouto, Kelly Rian Sanson, Steven Joseph Murphy

Review Score:

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Summary:

A bullied brute believed to be dead returns to slaughter a group of friends attempting to turn his former family home into a haunted house attraction.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Born deformed, but with brutish strength, a young boy named Johnny, who goes by the nickname “Popeye,” inadvertently murders one of his childhood bullies. As punishment, Popeye’s abusive parents lock him in their basement alongside his imprisoned sister Olive Oyl. Upset over the death, a mob of angry parents burns down the family’s home. Popeye escapes the blaze, but his body sinks into a nearby lake.

15 years later, social media influencers Mia, Cherry, and Cherry’s boyfriend Alan investigate the house’s remote location for a video about its supposed haunting. Back from presumed death, Popeye kills all three trespassers. With a note from under her door, Olive Oyl welcomes her brother back home.

Former schoolteacher Lora and her husband George inherit the house as part of a secret pact made with other residents in their town of Sweetville. Unbeknownst to her parents, Lora and George’s daughter Tara embarks on a project to turn Popeye’s former home into a haunted house attraction.

Tara enlists her boyfriend Dylan, her friend Donna, Donna’s boyfriend Nick, Nick’s secret sidepiece Sky, and their other friends Kathy and “Beanie” to help renovate the Popeye property. On their way to the lakeside location, the group encounters a fisherman who warns them against going to the house. Popeye later kills the fisherman.

The seven friends are startled by the sudden appearance of Olive Oyl at the front door. Before eventually leaving, Olive Oyl cryptically warns that the group isn’t supposed to be there, and that “he” wants them all to suffer like he did.

Nick and Sky privately argue over Nick’s refusal to have a real relationship with her by breaking up with Donna. Angered over the suggestion, Nick abruptly leaves Sky alone in an outdoor hot tub. Popeye murders Sky.

Harboring a longtime crush on her, Beanie asks out Kathy on a date. Kathy insults Beanie, causing him to skulk away by himself. Beanie makes his way to a pier where Popeye springs from the water to rip out Beanie’s spine and tear off his head.

Dylan’s mother Jane rushes to the home of Tara’s parents to tell Lora and George about the new deaths discovered at Popeye’s house. Jane returns a second time after learning their kids went to the property with plans to turn it into a public attraction. Lora refuses to tell her husband why she and Jane are suddenly so worried.

Donna receives a delayed text previously sent from Sky’s phone revealing Nick and Sky’s affair. Nick tries to reconcile with Donna, but Popeye ends up brutally killing him. Olive Oyl and Popeye frighten Donna into fleeing into the surrounding forest.

While searching for her missing friends, Tara finds a damaged classroom photograph depicting her mother as a schoolteacher. Dylan and Kathy recognize that their families have a similar photograph.

After she runs into a trap, Popeye kills Donna with a riding lawnmower. Seeing their friend slaughtered, Tara, Dylan, and Kathy flee. When she becomes separated from the others, Kathy tries escaping in a car, but Popeye blows it up to kill her.

Tara and Dylan’s parents arrive at the scene. Almost immediately, Popeye strangles Jane until her eyes pop out.

While she and George regroup inside the house with Tara and Dylan, Lora explains what really happened with Popeye, who was her student Johnny 15 years earlier. Lora reveals that after his death, the people of Sweetville all had dreams telling them to rebuild the burned house, for one of them to maintain ownership of the property at all times, and to never do anything with the home, a promise broken by Tara’s Halloween haunt project. Popeye became a figure who lives in the fog and haunts the dreams of his murderers. Lora further reveals Tara doesn’t remember trying to stop Popeye’s bullying when she was a little girl. Still fearing for her daughter’s safety, Lora joined the vigilante parents who set fire to Popeye’s house.

Olive Oyl interrupts to stab George to death while severely wounding Lora. Olive Oyl reveals Popeye is her brother, and explains he wants Tara because of the love she showed him when they were children.

Tara and Dylan escape outside with Lora. Olive Oyl catches up to them. Having been previously doused in gasoline, Dylan burns Olive to death by setting her on fire.

Popeye resurfaces to break Lora’s neck. Popeye then begins badly beating Dylan until he becomes caught in his anchor’s chain. Tara uses the opportunity to run over Popeye with the riding mower, seemingly destroying him. However, Popeye somehow survives to drag Tara away while Dylan screams.

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Review:

Including the screenwriter and producer, “Popeye’s Revenge” comes from a couple of people connected to “Piglet” (review here), a Poohniverse knockoff that didn’t contain a single entertaining minute, as well as “Mouse of Horrors,” a Steamboat Willie slasher whose eyesore aesthetics forced me to tap out in under ten minutes. Considering such poor pedigrees, if you discount amnesia and brain damage as possible explanations, why then would I willingly watch another piece of public domain pablum from the same names that specialize in B-movie trifles readymade for Tubi’s black hole of claptrap content?

Ever since “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey” (review here) regrettably knocked down an angry hornet’s nest of lo-fi horror flicks based on expired copyrights, it’s been clear they’re going to continue stinging viewers until more audiences are aware that there’s nothing remotely “official” about them. An uninformed moviegoer might see entertainment news about some lapsed Saturday morning hero becoming the next Freddy Krueger and think, “Hey, that sounds like fun!” Anyone who has previously rented property in Amityville, on the other hand, knows absolutely anybody can put one of these poverty projects together. No prior filmmaking experience is necessary, which is usually evident in the effort, or lack thereof.

As a trumpet that blares about this whenever another Amityville indie plops into the DTV bowl, I’ve taken it upon myself to ring similar klaxons about old cartoons corrupted into wannabe fright film icons. Not every time there’s a new release, and definitely not when another entry inevitably falls off the same assembly line as “Popeye’s Revenge.” But until someone finally makes public domain horror on a backlot instead of in a backyard, casts an actor I’ve seen in something that isn’t part of this pipeline, or has a budget higher than the Amazon Prime rental price, I’m limiting myself to one feature involving each appropriated character. By default for being first, “Popeye’s Revenge” draws this short straw for E.C. Segar’s creation, or maybe I draw it since I made myself sit through the thing.

As with “Piglet,” “Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare,” and the “Blood and Honey” movies for that matter, “Popeye’s Revenge” has next to nothing to do with what we traditionally know about its titular terror. This Popeye wears a sailor suit, sort of, but he isn’t a sailor. He mostly grunts, speaking nearly no words at all, so don’t expect to hear him say his signature “I yam what I yam” catchphrase in a menacing manner, either.

I’ve read conflicting reports regarding what parts of Popeye are free to use as of 2025. Some suggest he can’t yet be depicted getting superstrength from eating spinach, since that didn’t occur for the first time until at least a year after his original debut. “Popeye’s Revenge” features a shot where a cut-open can with something green inside rolls on the floor. Popeye smiles at it after beating the daylights out of some guy, implying what happened without definitively highlighting what happened. Maybe the movie’s makers weren’t sure what they could and couldn’t do either, which might help explain why Popeye’s history gets thrown out the window in favor of bizarre changes like making Olive Oyl his weirdo sister.

Instead of creatively using Popeye’s distinct characteristics, supporting cast, and expansive fiction, “Popeye’s Revenge” smashes together a hodgepodge of hokum culled from “Friday the 13th” (review here), “Nightmare on Elm Street,” and even “Halloween: Resurrection” (review here), believe it or not. An animated prologue, which looks like a child’s crude flipbook, blathers some backstory about how Popeye was bullied as a boy before drowning in a lake. Later we learn he now haunts the dreams of angry parents who burned down his house. I won’t dock points for Popeye inexplicably resurrecting as an adult since Jason Voorhees did the same thing. Though I did find it amusing that his beef involves some friends trying to turn his childhood home into a Halloween haunt, mainly because they mention it takes 12 hours to drive there, which sounds like a terrible commute for a seasonal attraction.

It doesn’t seem like more than a passing thought was given to how this messy plot could ever come together. The template has all the boilerplate beats like no cellphone service in a remote location, a car that won’t start, and regular intervals where someone finds a ridiculous reason to wander into the woods alone. If I have to award any credit at all, at least it looks like some nighttime scenes were shot with a professional light, although it also looks like they sometimes forget to turn it on.

“Popeye’s Revenge” is not a Popeye movie. You could plug any public domain character, even Sherlock Holmes, into this same setup and nothing would be different. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this started as a spec slasher script where someone simply used the Find function of their scriptwriting software to replace all instances of “Generic Killer A” with “Popeye” just to get eyes on the title.

People are quick to complain when big companies like Nintendo or Disney shut down homebrew mods and fan films, but this movie proves precisely why corporations litigiously protect their intellectual properties. Let anyone run wild without any oversight and you run the risk of releasing a figurative Frankenstein’s Monster into the world. I wouldn’t have thought I’d side with lawyers in such circumstances, but “Popeye’s Revenge” makes a strong case on their behalf for why ordinary people shouldn’t be allowed within an inch of lucrative IP.

Review Score: 15

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