Popeye The Slayer Man (2025) – It Is What It Is

Released: 21st March
Seen: 20th April

Over the last few years, a trend has been getting more common, namely that major well well-known works are entering the public domain, meaning that anyone can use them without a problem. For a long time, nothing was entering the public domain thanks to a certain set of laws being adjusted, but now major characters are turning up in the communal toy chest that we can all reach into at any time. What has also become something of a tradition is that people making low-budget horror films have been grabbing these new toys, slathering them with blood and using them to fill digital shelves with their low-budget fare. Most of these haven’t been great (Blood & Honey and The Mouse Trap both ended up on my worst film lists for their respective years) and there’s been some that show improvement (Blood & Honey 2 is still a genuinely fun time) but we’ve yet to have one that just got the joke right off the bat and made something that was enjoyable… until someone ate their spinach and presented us with Popeye The Slayer Man.

Popeye The Slayer Man takes place in a little seaside town known largely for a single abandoned can factory (one that seems to deal with mostly spinach cans) that the locals claim to be haunted by The Sailor Man (Jason Robert Stephens), who kills anyone who enters his factory. Of course this is a perfect place for a bunch of teenagers to sneak into late at night and make a little documentary about the Sailor Man, these teenagers including the main film-maker Dexter (Sean Michael Conway) and his crush Olivia (Elena Juliano) along with a bunch of other lesser characters who are mostly here to just be violently murdered by the legendary large-armed spinach-swallower that this film revolves around. Naturally, their plan to make a quiet little documentary turns nightmarish when it turns out that The Sailor Man isn’t just some legend but is actually real and is going to tear them all apart… he can’t help it, he is what he is.

The thing that Popeye The Slayer Man gets right that other films in this same genre failed to understand is that it gets the joke it’s trying to tell right off the bat. We’re here to see a Popeye Slasher film, not just a generic slasher film where some guy wears a Popeye mask. Without any doubt, this is what Popeye would be like if he were a horrific serial killer and every key element of the character is used correctly for the idea to work. Not only is his love of Spinach fully intact but it’s used well, it’s hilarious and creepy to just see an opened can of spinach roll out from the shadows to warn our characters that something is there, it’s funny to see someone use the lid of a can of spinach as a weapon. They also use some of his catchphrases well, the big one being “I Yam What I Yam”, it might’ve been nice to hear a version of the iconic laugh, but it might not have worked with the tone they were going for.

The tone of Popeye The Slayer Man is generally dark with very occasional elements of silliness thrown in, while there’s some obvious, unavoidable comedy to be found with this concept, it sticks to a darker tone that works more often than it should. It’s dark and gory and more than a little messed up in terms of tone, but all of that is made somewhat palatable because now and then Popeye will pop up in the corner of the screen, and the tension is diffused. It lets them push things a little more, be a little more gory and violent than you might expect a movie with Popeye as a villain to be. It’s not only violent but every one of Popeye’s deaths is done with his bare hands (makes sense, the guy is known for obscene feats of physical strength so why not use that in this setting?) which leads to a lot of head crushings and arms being ripped off that fit tonally within the film.

It also helps that Popeye The Slayer Man knows how to litter in the bits of Popeye lore, from a nod to Wimpy to having Olive Oyl be a major element of the plot later on. It all feels like a film that started with the Popeye elements and went from there instead of just taking some generic film and slapping the IP on it (aka doing what Blood and Honey did) which makes for a more complete and enjoyable film, it feels like they actually wanted to play with this toy instead of just sell a cheap shitty horror film based on being the first ones to do it with this character. It ends up allowing the stupid moments to be enjoyable instead of irritating, 

Now this isn’t to say Popeye The Slayer Man is some secret masterpiece because that would be silly, it looks about as cheap as it clearly is with some of the effects showing some rough edges and it falls into the trap of thinking that keeping everything underlit means it looks good (it doesn’t, sometimes it works when they want Popeye to emerge from the shadows but other times it’s just hard to see shit). It also has a few pacing problems, long stretches that can be kind of boring and a plot that’s largely easy to ignore. While Popeye The Slayer Man gets the joke it’s using, it doesn’t lean into it nearly as much as it should, which means it has moments that just make the audience lose interest and you shouldn’t be losing interest in a film where the killer is strong to the finish because he eats his spinach!

Popeye The Slayer Man is the exact kind of trash I want from this kind of idea, or at least as close as one could expect them to get. It knows what the hell it is and it isn’t trying to be anything more; it has a lot of fun moments of shocking gore, and the central villain is wildly entertaining just from a visual standpoint. It has the same kind of problems that many low-budget films tend to have, but it avoids the pitfalls that other Public-Domain-inspired horror films tend to have because it plays with the new toy properly. These films are pretty much shooting for the level of campy guilty pleasure you can watch with a bunch of mates while half drunk and laughing at the screen. Popeye The Slayer Man lands in that sweet spot and it’s about time someone got the joke right on the first try instead of waiting for people to give them notes.