2 gibbles out of 5

Director: Adam Wingard

If I told you that Pop Skull was reportedly made for around $3,000, would your mind be blown, or would you look at it and say: yeah, that’s about right.

Pop Skull tells you what it’s going to be like from the start: a warning that the images might cause epilepsy, and then the warning sort of blinks off the screen all trance like.  After the piece of banana dump that was “Visions of Suffering” ( a foreign “horror” flick that coasted by on low budget and flashy lights) I was a little worried.  But Pop Skull had some good reviews going for it (I read the one at Bloody Disgusting) and when the voiceover starts, it’s apparent that the style… well, matches.  It’s not that this couldn’t have been done completely differently and better, but it’d be a different film then, one the creator didn’t intend.  And though I’m surprised at the amount of praise this movie received (because it is boring), I do at least feel that this was a purposeful creation and not just an attempt to make something cool.  That counts for something.

It counts for 2 gibbles.

Pop Skull (apparently a slang term for the headache one gets when drinking too much moonshine…) is about a drugged up kid who’s trying to get over a breakup.  The epileptic flashes are an attempt to emulate both his drug state (brought on by tons of pills he ingests) and his mental deterioration… which starts causing creepy things to happen in his basement and violent thoughts that may or may not be real.  It’s a valid setup, but the lo-fi feel applies across the entire board: our lead talks in a monotone mumble and on-screen action is kept to a way minimum in favor of basement strobe-light scenes and some late-night conversations with friends.  The various praises for the film mention that the tension is still palpable, milking the door-creaks-slowly-0pen effect for all it’ worth, but I didn’t get that.  Whether hallucination or not, you know the film isn’t going to end up anywhere substantial.

Drop this image into a strobe effect for 80 minutes = the majority of the film

buy me