Horror Film Review: Poppers (dir by José María Castellví)

Posted on October 8, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“If you look for me, you will find me,” announces a billboard outside the apartment inhabited by a young man named Santos (Miguel Ortiz). The billboard also features a picture of a woman who appears to be beckoning whoever is viewing her. When Santos steps out of his apartment, he stares at the billboard. Later, under far different circumstances, he asks, “What was I supposed to find?”

Santos is an aspiring musician who lives in post-Franco Spain. At a performance, he sees another man flirting with his girlfriend. Suddenly, Santos finds himself standing in front of the man with blood on his hands. The man has been stabbed. There’s never any doubt that Santos killed the man, but the film leaves it ambiguous as to whether the murder was an act of impulse or calculation.

Santos spends two years in prison before he’s paroled. On his first night out, he meets a prostitute named Lola (Giannina Facio) and goes to a mansion with her. The next morning, he has breakfast with four old, rich men who tell Santos that they want to hunt him. If he can escape the grounds of the mansion, he will have a million dollars’ worth of gems to start a new life with. When Santos says that he’s not interested in being hunted, the men reply that he doesn’t really have a choice.

The thing that one notices is that Santos rarely shows any emotion. Whether he’s just killed a man or been informed that he’s going to be hunted, Santos is pretty much a blank. Even when he learns that one of the men who will be hunting him is also the father of the person he killed, Santos seems to shrug it off. Some of that was undoubtedly due to the acting limitations of Miguel Ortiz. But as the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Santos is as much of a hollow shell as the decadent men who are hunting him. If Santos seems empty, that’s because he is empty. The hunters, who obviously expected him to be easy prey, instead find themselves up against a sociopath who is just as determined as they are to get revenge. What began as just another rip-off of The Most Dangerous Game instead becomes a look into the world of absolute zero. There is no empathy, guilt, warmth, or mercy. The billboard invites the viewer to “find me,” but there is nothing to find.

Released in 1984, Poppers is a Spanish film and, to understand it, it helps to know a little about Spanish history. General Francisco Franco was the head of the Spanish government from 1936 to 1975. (My grandmother was born in Spain and came to the United States shortly after World War II. Growing up, I was usually the only kid in class to have encyclopedic knowledge of General Franco.) Franco died in 1975, nine years before Poppers was released. After being ruled for nearly forty years by one man, Spain’s transition from Franco’s regime to a more democratic system was not always an easy or smooth one, especially with Franco himself having been such a controversial figure. In Poppers, the hunters are the type of older rich men who presumably did what they had to do to thrive under Franco’s regime. (At least two of the hunters are gay, which was illegal in Francoist Spain, leaving one to wonder what they did to remain free and rich while so many others were being imprisoned or exiled.) Santos and Lola represent the next generation, the one that grew up largely without Franco. When they go after the hunters, they can be seen to represent the youth sweeping away the remains of Franco’s Spain. However, since neither Santos nor Lola are motivated by any ideology beyond their own self-preservation, the message seems to be that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Santos and Lola are not class warriors and they’re not political dissidents. They’re two people who are as empty as the people they’re replacing.

Poppers is an interesting and always watchable film. At times, the film’s imagery borders on the surreal. Director José María Castellví had a good eye for decadence. Ultimately, though, it’s a film that leaves you feeling uneasy. The closest thing the film has to a hero is a sociopath who takes a bit too much joy in killing. (The fact that all of the people he kills are bad does not make his demented smile any less unsettling.) The billboard asks us to look, but all we see is a world defined by absolute zero.

The Great Adventure (1975, directed by Gianfranco Baldanello)

Posted on April 19, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

During the Gold Rush, a young boy named Jim Chambers (Fernando E. Romero) rescues a German shepherd from a bear trap. Jim’s father doesn’t want Jim to adopt the dog but then he gets killed by Indians so what is he going to do about it? Traveling with two trappers who are also brothers (played by Manuel de Blas and Remo De Angelis), Jim, his sister, Mary (Elisabetta Virgili), and the dog move to the nearby town of Dawson City.

Jim and Mary want to take over the town’s newspaper, which was originally founded by their family. However, both the newspaper and the town have been taken over by an evil gambler named William Bates (Jack Palance). Bates may be willing to let the children run the paper but only if they allow him to take their dog. Meanwhile, one of the trappers falls in love with the local saloon keeper, Sonia Kendall (Joan Collins).

Though The Great Adventure is set in Alaska and tells a typical Western story, it’s an Italian film through-and-through. Jack Palance and Joan Collins may be top-billed but the movie itself is dominated by actors speaking in poorly dubbed English. This was one of several films based on White Fang that was released in the 70s and, like many of them, it’s an uneasy hybrid of a treacly family film and a violent western. On the one hand, it’s a film about two children and their dog trying to publish a newspaper and, on the other hand, Jack Palance kills people in cold blood. The film is so badly edited to be almost impossible to follow but I’m an unapologetic Jack Palance fan and I almost always enjoy any film that lets Palance do his thing. Unfortunately, The Great Adventure didn’t have as much Palance as I was expecting and Joan Collins is beautiful but hampered by the film’s G-rating. (For an actress who was affectionately nicknamed The Great British Open, Collins is always a strange presence in a family film.) At least the dog was a good actor. He eventually abandons his newfound family so that he can rejoin a wild dog pack in the wilderness and he probably made the right decision. He looks very happy at the end of the movie.

The TSL’s Daily Horror Grindhouse: The Ghost Galleon (dir by Amando de Ossorio)

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Blind Dead are back and this time, they’re on a boat!

Yes, you read that correctly. 1974’s The Ghost Galleon is the third film in Spanish director Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series. The decaying and blind Knight Templar are back and they’re just as evil and blood thirsty as they were in both Tombs of the Blind Dead and Return of the Evil Dead. However, this time, they’re on a boat. What are they doing on a boat? Apparently, they’re guarding some sort of Satanic treasure chest and they’re killing and eating anyone who makes the mistake of boarding their boat.

That means that this is the first Blind Dead film to not feature any scenes of the Blind Dead riding their horses in slow motion. That may not sounds like much but the absence of those horses is definitely felt. The Blind Dead on horses are a metaphor for everything from political tyranny to religious oppression. The Blind Dead on a boat are still scary but now they’re also vaguely silly.

And yet, the Blind Dead on a boat is not the silliest part of the film! The Ghost Galleon starts out with two models lost at sea. Apparently, they were hired by a businessman and aspiring politician named (in the version released in America, anyway) Howard Tucker (Jack Taylor). Howard is a boat manufacturer and he felt it would be great publicity if the models took one of his boats out into the ocean and pretended to get stranded. Apparently, Howard felt that this would convince the public that they could live for weeks in one of his speedboats if they needed to…

No, I’m not making that up. That’s the plot of the damn film.

ANYWAY — the models get stranded for real but suddenly, here comes a big, dark, old timey galleon. It’s just floating out in the middle of the ocean and it appears to be surrounded by a very thick fog. Naturally, the models decide to leave their boat for the galleon because why stay somewhere vaguely safe when you can get on a big, scary, evil looking galleon?

Now the models are missing and Howard needs to get his boat back. So, he and his evil henchman get yet another model to sail out to the middle of the ocean with them. Also accompanying them is a historian/scientist guy, who is mostly there because the film will later need him to fill in the backstory of the Blind Dead…

Now, I know that it probably sounds like I’m being supercritical of the third Blind Dead film but actually, it kind of works. The key is not to worry about logic, consistency, or anything you learned about at that screenwriting workshop. Instead, simply accept The Ghost Galleon as being the equivalent of a filmed nightmare. For everything that the film lacks in logic, it makes up for in atmosphere. (Let’s just say that the fog machine gets quite a workout.) And while it may not make much sense for them to be on a boat, the Blind Dead are just as scary, evil, and merciless as ever.

Add to that, the film has a great ending. I won’t spoil it here but I will say that the film’s final shot makes up for a lot of what you have to sit through in order to reach it.

The Ghost Galleon should not be the first Blind Dead film that you see. (Unfortunately, it can be found in several ultra cheap box sets, complete with a bad transfer and spotty soundtrack.) But if you’ve seen Tombs of the Blind Dead and Return of the Evil Dead, you should also see The Ghost Galleon. If nothing else, it proves the de Ossorio could get results with even the most ludicrous of premises.