Popeye: Maré de Horror

Man, I'm lowkey torn on whether I loved or hated this movie. I caught myself laughing a bunch of times, and there were a few lines that really stuck with me. It's totally off the rails, but I think that's on purpose, and yeah, there's blood everywhere. But it's not really scary at all. Feels like they're throwing shoutouts to Evil Dead and those old-school, cult horror flicks I used to grab from the rental store back in the day. Oli's character was dope tho, had me rollin'. The deaths? Wild and OTT as hell. It's chaotic, but in a good way. I'll probably run it back, feel like I missed some deep cuts.

Comets are nothing to mess around with.

I must admit that Popeye the Sailor Man is just about the last character I'd ever associate with the horror genre, so I was intrigued to see what the writers and director were going to do to make him scary. It was funny to see how they used his catchphrases and habits in news ways to keep the audience entertained. He made me laugh and shrink back in fear at the same time which is exactly the reaction I hoped I would have.

While I didn't need a lengthy explanation of why Popeye appeared, I did find myself wishing for more plot development here. The reason given for his murderous escapades never quite made sense to me, and trying to figure it out was a distraction from both the horrifying and the comical moments in this film. I would have chosen a higher rating if this wasn't the case.

It isn't necessary to be familiar with 1980s slasher flicks in order to enjoy this homage to them, but viewers who have seen at least one or two horror films from that decade may notice some cool throwbacks to the way things were filmed a few decades ago. Without giving away spoilers, I'm specifically thinking of the way rural settings were sometimes used to amp up the suspense back then and how isolation and fear could lead a character to make impulsive decisions that they might not have chosen if, say, they'd been in a city surrounded by other people.

Shiver Me Timbers was creative.

So there I was minding my own business scrolling on Tubi on my way to my watchlist and up pops this movie I don't know what the term is for creating a false narrative claiming to be true But they did it in this movie (I googled it) Any who Olive Oyl and friends go camping and run across old dude Who I guess is supposed to be Popeye All goes well till a piece of meteor shower lands in Popeye's pipe and he smokes it and turns into a buffed up killing machine Story is crap I wasn't feeling the horror comedy at all But the kills are surprisingly cool in a low budget schlocky kinda way.

I have to admit that I harbored zero expectations to this movie, as I sat down to watch it. Yeah, I've watch two other horror movies with Popeye and they been pretty terrible. But I still opted to watch "Shiver Me Timbers" on account of it being a movie that I hadn't already seen.

But this movie was God awful. Writer and director Paul Stephen Mann managed to maul E. C. Segar's work to a bloody pulp. And not in a good way. Nay, this was horrible in oh so many ways. Sure, the script was pretty straightforward for a slasher movie, but the attempts at incorporating comedy just made it into an even bigger mess than it already was. So yeah, you're not in for anything grand here.

Of course I was not familiar with a single actor or actress that starred in this travesty of a movie. Sure, some of the acting performances were actually fair.

The special effects in the movie were exactly that; special. Most of them actually had me laughing at how utterly ridiculous it was. And the fact that Popeye looks like some kind of mutated meatloaf and Colonel Guile from the fairly laughable 1994 "Street Fighter" movie just didn't work out in the least bit. Sure, some of the gore effects were actually passable and fair enough.

Writer and director Paul Stephen Mann doesn't seem to know how beheadings work, as there are two of them in the movie; and one has the guy still screaming after the head is chopped off, and the other has a girl's eyes going left and right after her head is chopped off.

"Shiver Me Timbers" is seriously the worst of movies based on the Popeye character so far.

I wouldn't even recommend this movie to newcomers of the slasher horror genre. Nay, "Shiver Me Timbers" was just hands down a terrible movie. Do yourself a huge favor and skip this one. Don't waste 73 minutes on watching this dumpster fire. Some of us literally suffered through this garbage, so you don't have to; you're quite welcome.

If you're looking for a quick way to end a friendship, recommend "Shiver Me Timbers" to a friend and watch the friendship melt away like a guy put into a barrel of acid that just happens to be around (which actually also happens in this movie).

My rating of writer and director Paul Stephen Mann's abysmal 2025 movie "Shiver Me Timbers" lands on a very generous one out of ten stars.

Shiver Me Timbers is the third (and hopefully last) Popeye horror film I have seen this year, after Popeye's Revenge and Popeye The Slayer Man. This one isn't the worst (That would be Popeye's Revenge), but it's close. Shiver Me Timbers' heart is in the right place, I suppose, with a suitably ridiculous plot and a decent amount of OTT violence, but the execution is extremely weak: the direction is basic, the script is terrible, the acting is amateurish, and there is an over-reliance on bad digital special effects. Even Popeye is CGI at times.

Set in 1986, the dumb plot sees a group of friends camping out so that they can witness Halley's Comet and the accompanying meteor shower. In the film's cleverest moment (make that the ONLY clever moment), a meteor is seen plummeting to Earth, but instead of causing a cataclysmic impact, the flaming rock is revealed to be minuscule, landing in an elderly sailor's pipe. The tiny rock causes the sailor to mutate, the man becoming a murderous, muscular maniac who goes on a killing spree, targeting the teenagers.

With a bigger budget and a lot more talent involved, this could have been very entertaining, but with incredibly unlikeable characters, a pathetic Popeye (he doesn't even have the character's massive forearms), an annoying use of horror movie quotes and references, and a finalé that is laughably bad, the film fails on almost every level. On paper, the ending must've sounded awesome, with final girl Olive (Amy Mackie) arming herself with a massive meteor-powered rotary saw to battle Popeye, but the reality is an ineptly handled mess, with some truly awful CGI.

2.5/10, rounded down to 2 for the lame Evil Dead inspired final scene. Not groovy.