“You’re a monster!” a terrified woman shouts at the hulking, murderous figure who haunts the local abandoned cannery.

“I yam what I yam,” the Sailor Man (Jason Robert Stephens) replies before presumably killing her in some grotesque way.

The Sailor Man haunts the cannery.  Some believe him to be a ghost be actually, he’s just a former sailor who has been mutated after eating too much contaminated spinach.  Now, he is freakishly strong and can literally rip people into pieces with his hands.  Running into the Sailor Man means that you will soon be seeing disconnected limbs, compound fractures, and split open heads.  The Sailor Man’s motives aren’t always easy to figure out but, if you smell the burning of his pipe, you should probably run.  With those gigantic arms and his permanent sour expression, the Sailor Man can pretty much do whatever he feels like doing.  Shooting him or stabbing him won’t stop him.  He’s hooked on the spinach.

Popeye The Slayer Man is one of three Popeye-themed slasher movies to be released in the wake of Popeye moving into the public domain.  In this one, Dexter (Sean Michael Conway), a film student, decides that he wants to make a documentary about the Sailor Man legend so he and his friends break into the cannery.  Almost everyone is killed in a bloody way and it’s hard not to notice that no one seems to be that upset about it.  Dexter comes across the dead body of someone who was previously described as being his best friend since the Second Grade and he barely seems to care.  Instead, he just lifts up his camera and films.  I’m tempted to think that this was meant to be a satire on the callousness of aspiring documentarians but I might be giving the film too much credit.  Who knows?

Obviously, you can’t take a film like this too seriously.  In almost every room in the cannery, there’s at least a handful of empty spinach tins.  To be honest, I actually think the film didn’t go far enough.  Sure, Popeye’s killing people and there’s a character named Olivia (Elena Juliano) but where’s Bluto?  Popeye is presented as a largely silent killer which, again, seems like a missed opportunity.  Popeye is also presented as being rather random in his kills.  He allows one person to survive for reasons that are incredibly unclear, beyond the fact that I guess the filmmakers felt that the character in question was too sympathetic to suffer the same bloody death as nearly everyone else in the film.

Other than the killer being Popeye, this is pretty much a standard low-budget slasher.  I will admit that I kind of appreciated that is was pretty straight-forward about its intentions.  Unlike a lot of recent slasher films, it never came across as if it was apologizing for being what it was and there’s definitely something to be said for that.  The film embraces the philosophy of “I yam what I yam.”  The Sailor Man would be proud.