Director: Robert Michael Ryan
Cast: Mabel Thomas, Scott Swope, Angela Relucio

I want to start this review by discussing something I haven't really got into depth before on this website - the idea of copyright. There are definitely some good things to come from the invention of copyright. The most obvious is that the party that copyrights something will be guaranteed all the profits to come from the property now and many years in the future... at least if they remember to renew the copyright if and when that action is needed. Related to that benefit that come from copyright action is that it's very unlikely another party will not try to copy what you legally own and try to get credit and money from it. The best thing about the concept of copyright is that it has allowed serious musicians to sue a whole bunch of rappers, like when the beyond awesome singer Gilbert O'Sullivan successfully sued the rapper Biz Markie after Markie committed blasphemy by sampling O'Sullivan's song Alone Again (Naturally) without getting permission first. (You don't ever want to mess with a powerful demigod like O'Sullivan.) On the other hand, every silver lining has a dark cloud; there are some things about copyrights that may not seem so great if you think about it a little. A pharmaceutical company, for example, upon making a new and life-changing drug, gets to have full rights for the medicine for many years, preventing competitors from making a cheaper version of the drug right away. As well, copyright throws a wrench on fans of books, movies, and television shows from making fan fiction from those entertainment properties to share with other fans, unless they manage to be really sneaky and below the radar. Plus, the advantages of copyright have made some entertainment companies very greedy. Take Disney, for example. With copyright in their corner, they have been very draconian by doing things with their lawyers such as demanding day care centers remove pictures of Disney cartoon characters painted on their walls, as well as going to court countless times to demand that available copyright time for a property be extended longer and longer.

There's one additional problem with copyright that I'd like to mention, and is the main focus worth discussing in these recent years. That is the fact that unless you are the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London that has a legal hold on a certain play involving a boy who will never grow up, you can never have a permanent copyright on any property - all copyrights to works eventually end, from the written page to silver screen material. When that happen, that means that anyone can get a hold of the once-copyrighted property and do whatever they want with it... in theory, that is. (More on that possible caveat shortly.) Some might argue that's a good thing, and I do have to admit that some arguments for copyrighting eventually ended have seen some benefits. Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, if he were alive today, might be very pleased that his out-of-copyright music is constantly being played all over the world more than two hundred years after his death. On the other hand, I have a queasy feeling as to what he would think of Hollywood musician and composer Walter Murphy disco-izing his Symphony No. 5 as A Fifth Of Beethoven (which was used in the movie Saturday Night Fever.) There is also the case of literary character Sherlock Holmes being in the public domain, and has been used for many wonderful new Holmes stories by various parties... but also including, unfortunately, the movie Holmes And Watson. But the results of properties falling into the public domain has become very interesting in the past few years when it comes to movie making. The most notorious example of this is when some indie filmmaker saw that A. A. Milne's Winnie The Pooh stories were close to falling in the public domain, and he quickly made the horror movie Winnie The Pooh: Blood And Honey, using Milne's famous and out-of-copyright characters. The movie was absolutely terrible (I lasted only twenty minutes before giving up), but it was financially successful, and that inspired various indie filmmakers to look on the timeline for the next well-known properties to go out of copyright and use those now public domain properties. When Mickey Mouse fell into the public domain, we got the horror movies The Mouse Trap and Screamboat using the character or its likeness. When Betty Boop a little later fell into the public domain, there was an immediate announcement for a horror movie using this character.

From what I have learned about many properties like those I listed above, there is a definite grey area when it comes to how you could possibly use a lot of them. You see, while Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop have fallen into the public domain, at the same time they are still trademarked by their original owners; unlike standard copyright, trademarks can last indefinitely as long as the trademark holder keeps being in business. Global Icons has the trademark for Betty Boop, and the Disney company still owns the trademark for Mickey Mouse. This means that if you made an innocuous movie like Betty Boop Goes To Japan or Mickey Mouse's Ocean Adventure, not only would the owners of the trademarks of these characters almost certainly sue you for infringing on their trademarks, they would almost certainly win in court. Small wonder, then, that the trend with other parties using public domain yet trademarked properties put the properties in outrageous and/or extremely comic situations. That's because parody and satire are protected by law, something lots of people, from the Mad Magazine staff to the makers of Sex Trek: The Next Penetration, have taken advantage of over the years. So it was no surprise to me that when the popular newspaper comic strip character Popeye entered the public domain in 2025, there were at least three movies made by indie filmmakers that took Popeye and used the character in outrageous horror situations; those movies were Shiver Me Timbers, Popeye's Revenge, and Popeye The Slayer Man. Since I try to review at least one example of any genre out there, I decided to watch Popeye The Slayer Man as an example of filmmakers jumping on public domain properties. The story is set around the Anchor Bay Cannery, a can factory located at the edge of the sea in some unidentified ocean town on New York state's coast. While the cannery was bustling decades ago, it was eventually closed and has remained vacant for many years... except maybe for the "Sailor Man", a rumored creepy figure that nervous locals claim has haunted the derelict building for ages. One person who dismisses the rumors is Lex Alistair (Richard Lounello), a businessman who owns the cannery property. Alistair has plans to demolish the cannery and build something productive on the property. Word of this gets to Dexter (Sean Michael Conway), a university student, and he decides to travel to the cannery and film a documentary about it before it's torn down. With him he brings four of his friends, though none know that one of their members, Katie (Mabel Thomas), who has a possessive boyfriend named Joey (Stephen McCormack, Harold And The Purple Crayon) don't know like them that Joey decides to travel to the cannery with two of his friends, since he doesn't want Dexter to fool around with Katie. Nobody among all these people, plus a few other characters I mentioned, knows that the Sailor Man legend might have some truth about it... and that all of them have managed to give a movie of this nature a high enough potential body count.

I imagine most, if not, all of you readers are curious as I was as to how the people behind Popeye The Slayer Man would treat the once-copyrighted but still trademarked property - with kid gloves, or full on? Well, one curious aspect of how the Popeye character is used in the movie is with his name - or rather, reluctance to use the name he's known by. Believe it or not, there is only one brief scene where the name "Popeye" is brought up, in both writing and spoken out loud; the rest of the time, the character is just referred to as "Sailor Man". Why this is, I am not sure, especially since otherwise the character is pretty damn close to how Popeye is presented in the comics and animated movies. He wears the iconic sailor suit, has a corn cob pipe in his mouth, he has the deformed arms and big chin on his face (the makeup effects for this character, by the way, are pretty good for a cheapie movie like this), he keeps eating spinach, and while he does have a very limited amount of dialogue, he does utter (twice) his famous line, "I yam what I yam." Perhaps the filmmakers thought they could comfortably use all of this, since they also add a big (and unexplained) scar on Popeye's face. Also, maybe for the fact that this rendition of Popeye brutally and bloodily kills a number of people in the movie's 88-minute running time. There's a graphic disembowlement, two heads are completely crushed by Popeye's hands, eyes are gouged out, and someone has his arm ripped off and is then promptly beaten to death with it, among other mayhem. Like the prosthetics on the Popeye actor (played by Jason Robert Stephens), the presentation of the blood and gore is pretty good, looking convincing and pleasing to any slasher fan's palate.

As I said, Stephens isn't given that much dialogue (almost none, as a matter of fact), but he passably says the little given to him, and with the prosthetics he manages to make the Popeye character look creepy and menacing. As for the rest of the cast, there really isn't that much to say about their performances. It's not that they give amateurish or strident performances, but except for Lounello - who manages to make his disreputable businessman character a believable sleazebag without going over the top - the rest of the cast generally give performances that are a bit bland and uninspired. Even when the situation starts to get serious for them, the presentation of bloody bodies have them act like it's not as pressing a concern than how you'd feel in the same situation. I don't blame the actors themselves for their generally low-key approach, one reason being that occasionally they do manage to sneak in a bit more punch. The problem seems to be that director Robert Michael Ryan got them all to deliver soft performances. While I will agree that this approach was much better than having the cast overacting and treating the movie with excessive camp - which would have made the tone of the movie painful and unfunny - all the same, Ryan took it a bit too far in this aspect of the movie. All the same, the low-key approach does manage to deliver some genuine and amusing humor here and there. Viewers who are familiar with the Popeye universe will spot some funny references to it at some points, and even viewers less familiar with it will find that the low-key approach to some plot points - Popeye was created from an ordinary sailor eating the contaminated spinach the cannery was processing - make for some real giggles. A haw-haw approach would have made those touches deathly unfunny.

While the script for Popeye The Slayer Man does explain why everybody's favorite spinach-eating hero is killing people in this incarnation, there are some plot points that are examples of genuinely bad writing. For example, early on in the movie, it's established by the protagonists that the cannery was closed due to reasons that were covered up... yet much later in the movie, they come across newspaper clippings that prove a number of sordid details were exposed. Also, it's never explained why Popeye stayed in the factory all of these years instead of going out and getting help. And to keep spoilers a minimum, I won't mention some plot holes involving him and one of the protagonists, though honestly, when you watch the movie, the "big surprise" revelation of the connection will be of no surprise. I was able to look past those script issues, but much less so with some bigger writing issues. The biggest problem with the script is how much it's padded out. Believe it or not, it takes almost sixty percent of the movie before the protagonists and bullies realize they are in danger when one of them is killed; up to that point, there is endless footage of all of them exploring the darkened abandoned cannery, except for one scene where an outside character comes to the cannery so she can be slaughtered and wake up the audience. Things do pick up somewhat once the young adults start being eliminated one by one, but impressive gore effects aside, many of the kills do feel somewhat softer than you would expect. While speaking of that, I want to add that the background tone throughout is also more often than not almost sedate in nature. The background music is soft and minimalistic, and there isn't a big feeling of danger or terror in the air. Problems like what I described explain why Popeye The Slayer Man doesn't deliver enough of the goods that you'd want... but at the same time, I have to admit that the movie wasn't anywhere as bad as I was expecting. For a movie seemingly made to exploit an expired copyright, it actually has some genuine merit to it. If you do decide to watch it, however, I would recommend you save it for a time when you are in a silly and forgiving mood.

(Posted September 29, 2026)