Shiver Me Timbers review
That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Shiver Me Timbers
Directed by Paul Stephen Mann
Written by Paul Stephen Mann
Starring Amy Mackie, Brendan Nelson, Tony Greer, David Hallows, Niamh Parrington, Paul Dewdney and Paul Stephen Mann
Shiver Me Timbers Review
I’ve been reviewing the onslaught of public domain slashers from the start. Truth be told, I’ve been desperately searching for positives within the whole shady ordeal. I’ve been clear in stating that I don’t have an issue with the idea of public domain characters used in independent horror films. Every Dracula movie you see is a horror movie based on a public domain character. That excellent Robert Eggers Nosferatu last year? A public domain horror movie. Yes…Eggers likely approached his film with slightly different intentions than the slew of unknowns scrambling to get their Mickey Mouse movie into production ASAP. But I’ve also found that many of those films come from a place far less cynical than may be obvious at first blush. If you want to make a movie that gets distribution…and Popeye is all that someone will bite on…do what you gotta do.
That being said, Shiver Me Timbers might have broken me.
Forget Popeye…it’s the worst movie of the entire public domain slasher revolution. Two Winnie-the-Pooh movies, a Peter Pan movie, four Mickey Mouses…and three Popeyes…it’s the worst one. It has nothing to do with its lack of having anything to do with the Popeye IP. That’s been every Popeye movie. Popeye’s Revenge was about the legendary Popeye House. Popeye the Slayer Man took place in an abandoned spinach canning factory. Sometimes they throw in a name or two from the material…and there’s always a Popeye based killer…but they’re just basic low-budget slashers with a weak Popeye skin placed on top.
Shiver Me Timbers is about a meteor shower in 1986. A group of teens (Olive Oyl and her brother Castor!) head to the beach to witness Halley’s Comet and an old sailor…presumably named Popeye…is mutated by a meteor. He becomes an unstoppable killing machine and tears through the group. In defense of Shiver Me Timbers…this Popeye does actually sit in a boat at one point. Fishing. Popeye the Fisher Man. Whatever. Still closer.
Let’s start with the movie being set in 1986. I knew we were in trouble with this moments into hitting play. A couple of overhead shots show off modern vehicles heading down the road before cutting to our lead characters in a car from the 50s. I don’t know what we were doing here…but it gets worse. Several times in the movie…characters make references to movies that aren’t out yet. Someone quotes Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. That came out months later. An Aliens homage fills up the end of Shiver Me Timbers. Aliens came out a month after Ferris Bueller. Our final girl breaks the fourth wall and quotes Evil Dead 2…a movie that wouldn’t come out until 1987. Which is still six years earlier than the Army of Darkness line lifted by another character in Shiver Me Timbers.
After some rough CGI shows us a meteor crashing into the water near…we assume…Popeye…the sailor man is transformed into a younger, bigger, deadlier antagonist. Setting aside that this has nothing to do with Popeye…the scene occurs in broad daylight sandwiched between two pitch black nighttime scenes. The new and improved Popeye unleashes some equally rough CGI kills on everyone who crosses his path. In one scene…he kills a character in a Porta Potty by ripping his head off. It looks better than some of the other stuff, to be fair. The head remains alive long after it is detached…and watches as Popeye uses his body as his own toilet. That’s what we’re dealing with in Shiver Me Timbers.
Some of the main characters just flat out go unnamed for most of Shiver Me Timbers. Olive, Castor and Castor’s girlfriend Cylinda are named early in the story. I didn’t discover the names of the couple they meet on the beach for another half hour. Not until they’re getting killed while having sex in a tent. That’s the level of care that Shiver Me Timbers puts into its characters.
There have been aspects of these bad slasher movies that I have genuinely enjoyed. I’m an easy mark for bad, low-budget slashers. Especially when they innovate in some small way. Not this time. Shiver Me Timbers fails at everything it does. The kills are forgettable at best…and terrible on average. Jokes amount to a fart during a conversation. It’s hard to believe that a movie could come along to give public domain slashers a bad name…but that’s the one thing that Shiver Me Timbers succeeds at.
Scare Value
Shiver Me Timbers is enough to make me abandon my quest to find purpose in these public domain slashers. Of course, there’s only ONE DAY between its release and the next one coming down the pipeline. Screamboat hits theaters tomorrow. It arrives at a time when the already low bar for this subgenre has reached its lowest level. I hope the people who made this had fun. No one watching it will.
1/5
Shiver Me Timbers Link
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