13 FOR HALLOWEEN #11: April Fool’s Day

How to rate 1986 in terms of horror movie? On the plus side, it gave us standouts ‘The Fly’, ‘The Hitcher’ and ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’, as well as the guilty pleasures of ‘Witchboard’, ‘Slaughter High’ and ‘The Wraith’. But it was also the year of ‘Killer Workout’, ‘Maximum Overdrive’, ‘Poltergeist II: The Other Side’, ‘Neon Maniacs’ and ‘Spookies’.

It was a year in which the stalk ‘n’ slash genre yawned with tiredness and sequels marinated in their own redundancy: in addition to the ‘Poltergeist’ follow-up, there was ‘Psycho III’ and ‘Demons 2’, while ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’ forewent the grainy, grimy, gruelling aesthetic of its predecessor and decided to be a comedy instead.

It was the year that gave us ‘Troll’ (which, four years later, would spawn an all-but unrelated sequel destined to be regarded as one of the absolute worst films ever made*) and cult trash-fests ‘Chopping Mall’ and ‘Class of Nuke ’Em High’.

It was an odd year for the horror fan and if said horror fan wanted to examine a film into which that oddness seems to have been distilled, they could do a lot worse than take a look at Fred Walton’s ‘April Fool’s Day’. It was Walton’s second feature film after ‘When a Stranger Calls’, made almost a decade earlier, and he went on to do very little else of interest; it has no big names in the cast; and its budget was a little over $5million. (When the film was remade, 22 years later, with Scout Taylor-Compton in the lead, the budget was still $5million!) For comparison, ‘Chopping Mall’ cost $800,000, and ‘Witchboard’ and ‘Slaughter High’ $2million apiece, while ‘Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer’ – arguably 1986’s most critically acclaimed horror film – cost just $111,000. And I’m damned if I know what that $5million gave ‘April Fool’s Day’: apart from Charles Minsky’s often gorgeous widescreen cinematography (who I doubt was pulling down mega-bucks for what was only his second gig)**, it pretty much conforms to the production values of most films of its ilk, i.e. single location, cast of unknowns, and make-up work that is actually pretty shoddy; moreover, there are no special effects to speak of, no explosions, no car chases, no helicopter shots, nothing that would have been especially costly to stage. Boat hire: one ferry, one speedboat. Vehicle hire: couple of cars, pick-up truck. Snake wrangler. Swimming cozzie.

Wherever the money went, then, this is what we get in terms of audience satisfaction: an attractive young cast (even if most of the characters are douchebags), some nice rural location work, a script that trades almost solely in rug-pulls, bloodless death scenes (in fact, death scenes that are often cut away from at the crucial moment), very few extended set-pieces and little tension generated by those that do at least attempt to remember that the whole project is supposed to be a tense horror flick, and absolutely zero nudity. If this were a Winter of Discontent pick, it would have ticked none of the boxes.

Still, we’re a little more forgiving in the 13 For Halloween stable, so let’s take a paragraph or two to dwell on the incidental pleasures of ‘April Fool’s Day’. First, though, a quick plot synopsis:

The hilariously named Muffy St John (Deborah Foreman) lives in an ancestral pile on an island accessible only by boat – she stands to inherit the property on her 21st birthday – to which she invites a group of friends for the weekend. The party includes the bookish Nan (Leah Pinsent), the vampish Nikki (Deborah Goodrich) and her wiseass boyfriend Chaz (Clayton Rohner), girl-next-door Kit (Amy Steel) and her underachieving boyfriend Rob (Ken Olandt), and prissy ambitious type Harvey (Jay Baker). On the ferry over to chez Muffy, a bad-taste prank ends in a deckhand sustaining a gruesome injury and a pall settles over the weekend before the celebrations have even begun. Nonetheless, Muffy hosts an elaborate dinner party and proposes a toast to friendship – a toast that ends with a prank of her own, albeit a more good-natured one.

That night, as the various guests take to their rooms, they experience further pranks, some genuinely funny (Kit and Rob trying to turn off the lights in their room: the off switch for one light triggers another to snap on), others darker (the tape of a baby crying in Nan’s room, something that has an unpleasant connotation for her). The next morning, Muffy’s behaviour alters: gone, the gregarious hostess; in her place, a strange, edgy young woman who could almost be a different person. Then one of the guests goes missing …

The first thing ‘April Fool’s Day’ does is effect a nice balance between the expected tropes of the genre and a satirical sense of humour in its approach to the material. The cast, all in on it (and what “it” is, I’m honour bound to keep shtum), play wittily off each other and know just how far to go in terms of tipping the audience a wink. Secondly, it takes the prank-gone-wrong scenario that was already a staple of the stalk ‘n’ slash genre courtesy of everything from ‘The Dorm that Dripped Blood’ (1982) to ‘Slaughter High’ (released the same year as ‘April Fool’s Day’) and has fun using the concept not as a set-up but a series of variations on a theme. Thirdly, it monkeys with the audience’s expectations in a way that stalk ‘n’ slash films rarely do: usually, there’s a red herring or two, but ultimately the business at hand is less about whodunit than how bloodily they did it and who the final girl will be. ‘April Fool’s Day’, on the other hand, positively embraces the whodunit playbook (Muffy’s palatial pad is described as being like “something out of Agatha Christie”), even if it does so purely to set up its final rug-pull.

Ah, yes. The ending. The thing that I can’t tell you about without going full speed ahead for Spoiler Island. Let’s just say that the clue’s in the title. Whether it works for you or not is, I suspect, entirely dependent on the mood you’re in. I watched the film this afternoon, indoors and warm while rain beat against the window and the wind howled; I sank a pink of the Old Crafty Hen while I watched it. My general mood was a sense of oneness with the world and everything in it, and I enjoyed the cheekiness of the ending. Had I been in a more critical mood – or a grumpier mood – I could well have hated the ending. Most critics won’t admit to that degree of subjectivity, would rather you believe that they uphold a rigid set of objective perameters. Movies like ‘April Fool’s Day’ poke fun at such fallacies.




*Let’s review that motherfucker for Winter of Discontent, shall we?

**Minsky went on the lens several dozen films as well as directing for film and TV. In addition to ‘April Fool’s Day’, his CV includes ‘Valentine’s Day’, ‘New Year’s Eve’ and ‘Mother’s Day’. He’s obviously the go to guy for films based on calendar dates.