The descent into darkness continues my friends, and I didn’t expect the darkness to contain such an attempt at levity.

Back in 1980, Paramount thought it’d be a great idea to make a live-action adaptation of Popeye. They thought it was such a good idea in fact, that they spared no expense: assigning wonder-producer Robert Evans, ace director Robert Altman, and threw $20M into the budget (which was a lot of loot at the time). The result was a loopy, disjointed mess.

This wasn’t the first time – and won’t be the last time – that Hollywood takes something mildly amusing and thinks that it can provide the basis of a mainstream film. It could be a toy, it could be a comic strip, it could even be an old TV show. Somewhere deep in the dungeons of Hollywood are a team of monkeys facing a giant wall of every mildly popular pop culture property. Day after day they continue to fling their poop at the wall, and once or twice a year the poop hits a bullseye on one of these properties. The head monkey then takes it off the wall, wipes off the poop and gives it to some keen studio go-getter to be green-lit.

POPEYE is a mess. It has actors romping around a wildly elaborate set, slap-sticking their way from scene to scene, muttering lines that don’t seem to want to tell an actual story and occasionally bursting into song. Some of the songs, composed by Harry “Everybody’s Talkin” Nilsson, are actually pretty sweet. Not all of them though – which only makes this silly property seem sillier. At least they provide a break from the insufferable dialogue.

In the last few years, I’ve been becoming more and more of a fan of director Robert Altman. I’ve found myself quite charmed by his humanistic stories and overlapping dialogue. With that said, I can only hope that Altman bought himself a really beautiful house with the money he made off POPEYE. He wasn’t the first director to take the money and run, and likely won’t be the last. Every director has one of these films in them – the property that seems like either an opportunity or an opportunity to cash in. Heck, look at what Ang Lee did with THE HULK!

It’s up to us to finally stop the monkeys from flinging their poop. We are the ones who need to resist paying our hard-earned to watch big screen offerings like DUKES OF HAZARD, MARMADUKE, and JONAH HEX. It’s gonna get harder going forward, as producers seem more scared than ever to give us original material (brace yourself for BATTLESHIP: THE MOVIE next year).

As for this film’s place on the shelf, as I endured the pain, I was able to take a small measure of satisfaction in knowing that I was right. You see as the film began, my beloved was in the room with me watching. After fifteen or twenty minutes, she declared “I swear I remember this being better” and realized she had other things to do. In the past I’ve questioned why she owns this film – I’m happy to know that she’s questioning that too now.

‘Course it doesn’t salve the wound POPEYE inflicted on my movie-watching soul.