“Wow, that was crap!”
That my reaction to watching Shiver Me Timbers, one of three killer Popeye movies that came out in 2025. Online, there’s some debate over which of the three films is the worst. I’ve only seen two of them so I really can’t say. What I can tell you is that Shiver Me Timbers makes Popeye The Slayer Man look like a freaking masterpiece by comparison.
The film actually does start off with a vaguely clever premise. The year is 1986 and a group of friends are camping so that they can watch as Halley’s Comet crosses the night sky. Our main character is Olive (Amy Mackie), who isn’t sure whether or not she wants to go to M.I.T. I have to admit that I could relate to Olive, just because I wouldn’t want to go to college in Massachusetts either. Plus, Oliva wears all black and has a generally sarcastic attitude, which is pretty much the same way that I was when I was 18.
Anyway, a piece of a meteorite falls out of the sky and, after getting nearly burned up in the atmosphere, it falls into the pipe of a scrawny sailor who is fishing out at the lake. The sailor smokes the tiny meteorite and is immediately mutated into a hulking killer. He proceeds to kill all of Olive’s friends. The deaths are extremely bloody and go out of their way to shock but, oddly enough, they don’t make much of an impression. Part of the problem is that Olive’s friends aren’t that interesting and, as a result, you don’t really care that much about any of them getting killed. The film has this weird habit of featuring close-ups of decapitated heads still struggling to speak. I’m going to be charitable and assume that this was meant to be an homage to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Herzog, however, was smart enough to only have one decapitated head speaking.
For all the pain that the character go through as Popeye snaps their bones and removes their heads, the real pain is reserved for those watching the movie. The pacing is abysmal, the dialogue is terrible (and please, can we stop making slasher movies where the victims all keep talking about other slasher movies?), and the mutated Popeye looks so dumb that it’s hard to take him seriously as any sort of threat. (Popeye The Slayer Man at least had a vaguely credible killer Popeye.) The film ends with a shout-out to Evil Dead II and it actually would have been pretty cute if the film before it had been better. As it its, it feels like an unearned comparison.
On the plus side — because I hate to be totally negative about anything — the shots of the night sky were actually very effective. That may sound like almost a parody of faint praise and I guess maybe it is but seriously, there was some real beauty to shots of the stars moving across the sky.
Anyway, let’s stop turning public domain characters into murderers, shall we? Thanks!
Through the Shattered Lens 