I’ve been to horror festivals and I can tell you that it’s very rare for a crazed, revenge-minded, burned-up psycho killer to show up and start making barbecue out of people in the theater. About the worst drama you can expect from these things is a guy knocking over your popcorn when he gets up and scoots his way down the row for a bathroom break—and what the hell kind of movie would THAT make? The makers of Popcorn wisely took the psycho killer route. There are some pretty good kills here (I like the scene where Tony Roberts gets impaled by the stinger on a giant prop mosquito, just because you won’t see that in any of his films with Woody Allen), but the best thing about this overly convoluted slasher job are the movie geek in-jokes. Its main characters are college film students putting on a horror show to raise cash for their avant garde projects. You won’t be able to take part in a hot-air discussion of Ingmar Bergman again after you hear these dweebs get into it in an early scene here. Meanwhile, the films they show are deft parodies of 1950s paranoid sci-fi matched with homages to William Castle. First-time director Mark Herrier really gets into it, which is good because he’d never direct another feature film again. He got his start in the business as an actor, with his biggest claim to fame being a recurring role in the Porky’s series. Sounds he knows exactly what it feels like to meet a sorry fate at the movies.