Crew
Director – William Stead, Screenplay – Harry Boxley, Producer – Rene August, Photography – Vince Knight, Music – James Cox, Special Effects – Tequila Carter & Paul Frost. Production Company – August Hound Productions/ITN Studios.
Cast
Emily Rose Mogilner (Tara), Connor Powles (Dylan), Bruno Cryan (Nick), Danielle Ronald (Donna), Fyn Phoenixx (Max ‘Beanie’), Atlanta Moreno (Sky), Karolina Ugrenyuk (Kathy), Stephen Joseph Murphy (Popeye), Amanda Jane York (Lora), Oliver Jason (George), Kelly Rian Sanson (Olive Oyl), Danielle Scott (Mia), Kyle Jordan (Alan), Eva Ray (Cherry), Kathi DeCouto (Jane)
Plot
Tara takes the keys to the notorious Popeye House that her parents have inherited in Sweetville. Fifteen years earlier, a problem child Johnny, who was nicknamed Popeye, drowned in the lake. The house was burned down but then discovered having mysteriously been rebuilt. Tara has persuaded her friends to help her turn the house into a Halloween funhouse attraction, dismissing warnings to stay away. However, their presence serves to revive Popeye from the lake and he comes, brutally slaughtering all interlopers.
Popeye is the famous comic-strip character created by Elise C. Segar in Thimble Theater in 1919. Popeye’s distinctive one-eyed squint, oversized forearms and taste for spinach proved so popular that he soon graduated from a supporting character to take over the comic, which was later named after him. Popeye’s greater fame grew out of a series of 108 cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios between 1933 and 1942. Hanna-Barbera later produced The All-New Popeye Hour (1978-83) and there was later the bomb of the Robert Altman directed live-action Popeye (1980) film starring Robin Williams, although this is a film I will happily defend.
In 2025, the character of Popeye entered public domain in the US. As with the similar success had by Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood & Honey (2023) after the Winnie the Pooh stories came into public domain, this was immediately greeted by several horror versions of Popeye with Popeye the Slayer Man (2025) and Shiver Me Timbers (2025) all coming out around the same time.
Popeye’s Revenge is produced by ITN Studios who acted as distributor for the Winnie-the-Pooh films. They have taken their lead from that and been behind a bunch of other, principally British-shot films, that savagely deconstruct childhood favourites with the likes of Cinderella’s Curse (2024), Bambi the Reckoning (2025), Hook (2025), Mouseboat Massacre (2025), Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025) and Piglet (2025), while they had also acted as distributor for several of Scott Jeffrey’s other fairytale horrors with the Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill and Tooth Fairy films. ITN have promised to bring these together in the announced Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble. Most of these are written by Harry Boxley.
The film’s Popeye certainly has the sailor hat, cob pipe, squinty eye and bulging forearms. Beyond his appearance however, this Popeye is almost entirely divorced from E.C. Segar’s creation. There is an Olive Oyl who now goes from Popeye’s girlfriend to his sister. A can of spinach is even thrown into a room at one point. But like the Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh horror films, Popeye’s Revenge is unimaginatively conceived even as a horror film and is getting by only on the outrage factor of the associated name.
What we end up with here is essentially Popeye reconceived as Jason Voorhees. Popeye gets an origin story as a big, hulking child who was rejected and then drowned in the lake, just like in Friday the 13th (1980), and, as per the sequels, rises from the lake to slaughter all and sundry who came into the area. Just like the Friday the 13th films, the focus is on gory kill set-pieces.
Popeye’s Revenge follows the formula of the slasher film in all regards. Things do get very gory as various of the cast are despatched – there is a fairly outrageous one as Fyn Phoenixx is sitting on a jetty and gets an anchor to the crotch and then his spine ripped out. But as to the film doing anything clever with the Popeye, it is exactly the same as ITN’s Mickey Mouse and Winnie-the-Pooh films – they are standard horror films that go for a beeline for the nastiest and goriest while using familiar children’s characters in name only.
Director William Stead had previously made the vampire film Children of the Night (2023).
Trailer here