Shiver Me Timbers

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.

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.

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.

Man, is this one a stinker. But I think it is supposed to be intentionally bad in a money laundering scheme by a nefarious criminal organization that loathes us.

It's Uwe Boll bad. It's bow-chicka-wow-wow level of acting. One of the cops clearly just come from a circuit party with his earrings and yellow pseudo-Aviators.

Bernice was okay. But the rest of this trash fire of a movie is just all wrong and not in a remotely so-bad-it's-good-and-comes-back-around-to-bad-and-settles-on-watchable way.

It also fails at capturing the mid-80s.

It's a quick cash grab on expired copyright. Although it really fails to even emphasize the Popeye thing.

Do not pay to see this.

Absolutely nobody who puts this movie on is expecting an oscar winner nor anything serious. Why people are hating on this when it's been done deliberately that bad it becomes good and hits all the hilarity you could expect from a movie of this ilk... I'm sorry but this is definitely a 6 and will keep you laughing all the way through just for the sheer hilarity. They nailed this, fun night in. Only idiots would actually expect this to be a serious movie. What's not to like about a old aged pensioner who smokes a pipe fishing getting hit by an asteroid and then turning into a pot smoking serial killing meathead.