April Fool's Day
With a title like April Fool’s Day, one does not except to be fairly dealt the facts. The facts, however, are as fairly dealt as most of them go: the characters are as annoying as they seem, with one exception – who is more so; the sex is as real as the sex in any other slasher movie, and not the less sincere on the characters’ parts for lacking nudity. Lovers grow as tired of novelty as everyone else, and it’s not the character’s fault that the audience has never seen her breasts, nor the boyfriend’s fault that he has seen them so often he doesn’t care to see them again. Despite whatever I may say about it elsewhere, nudity can be disposed of in a slasher movie as long as there is enough murder and gore to make up for it. And this is where April Fool’s Day loses whatever fully-clothed charm it had. The twist of April Fool’s Day is that no one dies: they only pretend to. And they do not pretend to die as violently as they should. The movie begins with a character named Chaz – perhaps the most likable of the bunch but only because he likes pornography and will not be seeing any for the next ninety minutes – filming the other characters before they catch a ferry to an island. Through Chaz’s home video I am introduced to Nikki, Chaz’s girlfriend; or whatever shade of grey passed for a girlfriend in the later 80s until it evolved into the “friend with benefits” we all know and never loved. Niki jokes that she “fucks on the first date”, but don’t get your hopes up; although it is April 1st, (or maybe that is another lie), which would be her time of the month to fuck someone even if it is Chaz, the sex scene between them is hardly an aphrodisiac. Niki will have other interesting things to say about her sex life later, when she waxes loquacious at the prompting of a sex quiz that probably never had women like Niki in mind when it was written. Another character is Arch Cummings, a name he sadly doesn’t makes puns about even when he’s around other characters named Skip, Buck and Muffy. He’s played by Thomas F. Wilson of Back to The Future fame, who does not bring to April Fool’s Day any of those qualities of Biff’s you would love to see in a slasher film, particularly his inability to remember similes correctly. There are many moments when Arch Cummings could say things like “you better make like a fetus and butt out.” There is another woman named Kit, who is the final girl of April Fool’s Day, and a boy named Skip, the most sensitive of the men in the movie and maybe for that reason the first to go. After the credits I meet Muffy, who had a former relationship with Mr. Cummings she is not very forthcoming about. (Arch will later say that it is his mission “to bed as many women as possible”) Muffy has invited this disparate group of morons to her island under the pretense of a party. Throughout the party, each friend of hers will pretend to die until all is revealed to the one remaining friend, and thus the butt of the joke, that the massacre was a prank all along. Thus April Fool’s Day is like an extended second act of any slasher movie full of pranks, with all of the sex and death cut out. After the credits three other characters arrive at the dock: Nan, who is a classmate of Muffy’s who has a taste for Paradise Lost; Rob, who is Kit’s boyfriend and can’t get into medical school (that is his one and only theme); and Hal, who goes to school with Muffy and wants to date and possibly marry her because she is rich; not because she is played by Deborah Foreman and especially not because he’s seen Valley Girl. Skip and Arch play an April Fool’s joke as the ferry approaches the island. In a fit of false rage, Arch throws a switchblade at Skip, who catches it with his belly and falls off into the water. Buck, the son of the ferryman, dives off to save him. After Skip is saved he reveals that the blade went into a contraption around his waist. It is unfortunate the stabbing wasn’t real: a dying Skip on the ferry might force Rob to confess his medical school problems early, which will give him and Kit an earlier chance to fight about it and any sane person an excuse to turn the movie off. Buck remains in the water to tie the boat to the dock, which he attempts to do without paying attention as the boat approaches. He loses an eye for his efforts. This accident is part of Muffy’s Master Prank, and it begs a serious question as to how Buck planned to dive into the water without a Skip in it to ostensibly save. Was Muffy counting on Arch and Skip to pull such a prank? Or did Buck have other instructions, such as a spontaneous skinny dip that would make his eye-gouging less tragic because her friends saw him naked first? Cal, Buck’s father, takes him away to a hospital on a boat the Constable happened to have at the dock, with Buck screaming “They did it!” as it speeds away. The Constable tells the kids to stay put; if anything else happens he wants to know where they are. Clearly they are not responsible for Buck’s lack of common sense, his eye, or any other organ he may lose on the way to the hospital. If the Constable thinks one of them gouged out Buck’s eye directly he is a fool for not arresting them all. The kids don’t stay put, or at least they don’t stay on the dock, because in the next scene Rob, Skip, and Kit are driving to a house in a truck. If the Constable did not intend for them to stay at the dock, he is rather stupid for telling them to stay put because they’re on an island, and I don’t think any of them want to swim anywhere else after what happened to Buck, who might be out there later in a speed boat, one eye or two, expecting them to do exactly that. Skip believes it was his fault Buck was injured. He also says that nothing bad ever happens to Muffy, without the awareness that you cannot say “Muffy” without something bad happening already. Once everyone is at the mansion, the women that sex quiz I mentioned earlier. It is a multiple-choice quiz about losing your virginity. Muffy’s experience was “painful and degrading”, but she also “really cared about him”. Kit “really cared about him” as well, and makes it a point to the others that she did not lose her virginity to Rob. Nikki’s experience was painful and degrading, and also “wildly exciting”: she had an orgasm. Shortly after this Arch professes his female-bedding campaign, which, if restricted to this particular party, might be impossible considering that Nikki and Kit have boyfriends. He shuts off his options completely, however, by saying Nan is out of the game because of her theater interests. Arch must have had some previous theatrical sex that left a bad taste in his mouth. And he didn’t have an orgasm. Later Skip sits on the porch with a glass of wine and complains about poor boys having easier lives than himself. I wish there was a DVD option that allowed me to skip scenes with Skip. The group gets together for dinner, where there are dolls dressed to resemble them and sitting in their pre-assigned chairs. Someone put a whoopee cushion in Nan’s chair, which she sits on twice – or perhaps she farted the second time; I trust no one – and Arch’s chair collapses on him as he laughs at her. These are the first in a series of pranks I suppose Muffy arranged to lighten the mood before people start dying, but she could have lightened it much better by having everyone take the sex quiz and then I could find out why Arch really doesn’t want to sleep with Nan. Buck’s accident is briefly discussed, proves unpleasant, and is suppressed. Kit tries to change the subject by mentioning that Rob will be going to medical school – not a difficult, if less appropriate, segue from Buck – and Rob doesn’t want to talk about it, but he eventually has to admit that he won’t be getting in because he isn’t serious enough. Conversation is now at a standstill, so Nan and then Muffy give toasts to friendship and the scene closes with the guests spilling champagne on themselves from faulty glasses. After dinner Muffy shows Nikki her room, which Nikki is impressed with and calls “the bridal suite”, as if a bridal suite is something Niki and her painful and degrading sex will enjoy. They have a confrontation about Chaz, whom Nikki tells Muffy to leave alone because Muffy has a habit of getting there first when it comes to guys. She brings up Arch as an example, and this makes me think Muffy has gotten there first many, many times. Muffy replies that Arch has only two “expressions”: “collar-up, and collar-down”. Either she is using “collar” as a synecdoche for Arch’s penis or is saying Arch is bi-sexual, and is thus a much greater threat to Nikki’s relationship with Chaz than herself. Muffy mentions Hal so the movie can cut to a scene with him in his room preparing a speech for Muffy that could be a marriage proposal while smoking a cigar. He finds a newspaper article tacked on the back of the closet door about six people dying in a fog, and then two more articles in a dresser drawer of a similar gruesome nature. Chaz busts in on him before he has time to read them. Arch finds a needle and a tourniquet in his room, whereas Nikki finds some S&M gear in hers that resonates badly with her response to the sex quiz. Muffy could not have put the S&M gear in her room on the fly unless she had it on hand, and thus Nikki’s admitted preference for kinky sex must be one she shares with Muffy, and between themselves they have shared a lot of boyfriends with apparently Niki having all the orgasms and Muffy all the compassion. In her room, Nan finds a tape recorder that plays a baby crying, which means some poor soul had to record it. Nikki and Chaz have sex in a position that makes it impossible to tell where Niki ends and Chaz begins. Before he goes to sleep Arch hits on Muffy, but she isn’t in the mood, although it would be a much better prank to lead him on only to abruptly change her mind and leave him alone, with Nikki and Chaz having trailblazing sex in one room and Nan with her crying baby in the other. He overhears Nikki and Chaz having sex, but I have to guess that he hears them because I am assuming Rob and Kit aren’t having post-medical-school-rejection sex. Meanwhile Skip’s wine-induced reflections on Buck’s depth-perception problems have taken him on a stroll to the boat house, where his own double vision would have drowned him in a better movie. While he is inside he is attacked from behind and will not reappear until he sobers up. The next morning Nikki opens the windows wearing an unbuttoned shirt, and shortly after thinking it will be a good day, sees Hal bending an exercise stick in ways that suggest he observed her and Chaz having sex and wants to participate in the future as best he can. She retreats to her room in disgust. Kit and Rob decide to have sex after they reconcile their relationship. They go to the boat house, where they are interrupted when Kit sees Skip’s grey corpse float by under the boards. Rob immediately thinks Skip is pulling a prank and calls him a son of a bitch. Skip did not disappear long before his dead body was found, which destroys any tension over his disappearance that the movie perhaps realized wouldn’t have been that tense anyway on Skip’s account alone. However indifferent the guests might have been to his disappearance before foul play was suspected – only Arch realized Skip was not around, and Chaz makes a smart-ass remark about it – and indifferent they might be now that he is dead and they barely even noticed that he disappeared first, it is evident that there is a killer afoot and he has lost the element of surprise. Rob and Kit notify the other kids of Skip’s demise. A search is conducted and Skip’s switchblade is found broken with blood on it. Muffy was not on the boat, so she had no way of knowing about the prank Skip and Arch pulled on it and thus that Skip had a switchblade. Arch arms himself with a pole and declares “No sucker’s taking me!”. If he’s thinking about Buck, he is armed well enough considering that the switchblade was broken and the other half of it is probably still inside Skip. I do not remember if Skip was fished out of the water or left to float to Valhalla on his own. Although none of the other bedroom pranks are mentioned again, Nan confronts Muffy over the tape-recorded baby cry in her bedroom. She suspects Muffy is pulling a prank on her and that the prank was the purpose for inviting her. This is true, but the joke if far darker than Nan suspects, and Nan suspects Muffy is mocking an abortion she had earlier. It is never revealed if Muffy knew about Nan’s abortion and is too crass to have imagined the baby tape would offend her, or if it was simply the luck Muffy has so far had of pulling the worst possible prank on the worst possible person. Speaking of babies, Arch is caught in a rope trap hanging from a tree, the sort of rope trap that will contribute to a real death in Friday the 13th Part 2, which also stars Amy Steele. It would not be a far-fetched idea to suspect Jason would want to kill Thomas F. Wilson after he killed Crispin Glover. Arch is almost bitten by a rattlesnake that was not part of the plan. The snake is kicked away by someone wearing a boot. If the purpose of the prank is to scare the guests, why not include a masked man who confronts them? This would make the prank more terrifying for those involved, and make the audience believe there is a killer instead of some random asshole walking around and ruining the perfectly good death-setups Mother Nature has created. Rob and Chaz are unable to find Skip, and this displeases Niki so much she isn’t certain if she is displeased or not. “I don’t like this. I definitely don’t think I like this.” That ambiguity I’m afraid won’t bear much insight on whether Nikki likes or doesn’t like that Skip may or may not be dead. This is one of the unfortunate side effects of Muffy’s Master Prank that she never perceives. Skip is not actually dead, but Nikki doesn’t know this, and although she’s grammatically challenged, she never truly appears concerned about Skip’s welfare. This is not good. Putting your friends – supposed friends – in a situation where there is a killer is equivalent to discovering unpleasant facts about your friends that might make staying friends with them afterwards impossible. Imagine, if you will, a similar prank outlined with the Donner Party in mind: you starve your friends and then feed them each other without letting them know they are really eating fried chicken. One might not like the taste of the other and complain. Suppose one friend takes a liking to human flesh and forms an addiction he can never overcome. An addiction that, even when it was proved to be fried chicken after all, does not erase the placebo effect and leaves several people dead and eaten. The same goes with serial killers and disappearing friends, especially when there are people like Hal around who isn’t really friends with anyone and will have no problem killing any of them. And Hal has a gun that Muffy doesn’t know about. He might have a taste for human flesh as well. Who knows? Hal might actually be killing people and Muffy thinks it’s all part of her prank because their hit lists correlate. She has that sort of luck. Muffy has taken on a change since she woke up in the morning. She seems outright disinterested in her party, and more than a little loony. Kit wants to call the police. She must be confident that Skip wasn’t murdered by Buck because that’s the last thing she would want to do if he was. Muffy gives her Constable Porter’s home office number, but something goes wrong when Rob attempts to call. This is not a good sign, considering that Constable Porter was the one who took Buck to the hospital and has apparently put all business aside until Buck either dies or gets better. The house’s water system also malfunctions, which means someone has to go to a well to get water. Nikki and Hal leave to do this while the rest of the gang stay at the mansion. While they are at the well, Hal tries to convince Nikki that he is not a hick, an ambition he immediately derails when he tells her he wants to plough her field. Nikki is a city girl if she is nothing else, and this metaphor will not have pleasant connotations given her life experience with ploughs and fields. Hal, despite being a country boy himself, drops the bucket in the well and then Nikki drops the flashlight. I know some time had to be filled to flesh out this movie, but I would rather have five minutes spent seeing the tangled, implausible sex Nikki and Chaz were having unfold in all its glory than Nikki and Hal bungle getting water out of well. Nikki goes into the well to retrieve the bucket and the flashlight, then the ladder breaks and she falls in and spoils the water with her unwashed, post-Chaz sweat. She pulls her hair back and Arch’s head floats to the surface, all the putrescent gas within it making it lighter than water as it was lighter than air when he was alive. Skip’s head also pops up, and Nikki screams and this brings Hal down the well to save her. While he does this Nikki, for reasons most would not have after two decapitated heads just floated up from the depths of a well, dives into the water and comes up with what appears to be Nan’s body. The immediate question is why Arch and Skip were decapitated and Nan was left whole. Hal saves Nikki and they go back to the house without water but a clear idea of where Arch, Slip and Nan can be found should anyone feel like getting them out. If there was any doubt that there is a killer around, and any hope that Skip had killed himself, both can no longer be indulged unless the incredibly deluded fancy is entertained that Skip was killed by Arch and Nan got in the way. The more certain implication is that Hell is three degrees warmer today than it was yesterday. Kit attempts to comfort Muffy with a false cause fallacy that the Skip, Arch and Nan (poor Nan, not even missing long enough to be dismissed) were killed because they were outside, whereas they are all inside and aren’t likely to meet the same fate. This is relying on a killer’s laziness, in light of his getting on a boat and getting on the island in the first place, that I have never seen displayed by someone who is presumed to be a level-headed character. Hal is more practical. He wants to know where the guns are, but Muffy tells him there are no guns in the house: she got rid of them if there were any, to be sure. No need to worry though, Hal brought his own gun. Muffy attempts to comfort Nikki by pouring her a glass of water, and considering what Nikki just saw this is a very cruel joke indeed. Muffy tells her it’s Perrier, but I don’t believe her. It’s the same tepid tap water Nikki thinks she risked her life to get and won’t drink again without thinking about decapitated heads and being rescued by a hick who wants to drive long steel claws into her in order to sow his seed. Constable Porter calls back and has a conversation with Rob. He tells Rob that the killer can’t be the ferryman because the ferryman has been with him all day. This does not disprove the possibility that the ferryman could have unknown accomplices he could send to kill the kids, but Rob doesn’t think of this, and that is why Rob is not in medical school. Porter says he will come to rescue the kids and will send a flare up when he gets there. He tells them to come as a group when they see it, but I do not see any safety in numbers considering this group and any killer who would come after them, because he has already managed to kill two armed men, decapitate them, and then drown a woman either before he dumped the bodies at the well or during the dumping process itself, and thus killed her and the chore of disposing of her with the same stone. And since it was Skip’s head that was in the well, which I saw floating and attached to his body earlier, that means the killer retrieved Skip and decapitated him. They decide to secure the house, which is always a bad idea in a slasher movie because it only secures the house from outside help and locks you inside with the killer. They gather in the living room, where Nikki tells everyone that Muffy is acting strange.. Hal mentions the conversation he overheard between Muffy and Nan, which he says had something to do with an abortion but might be wrong. For all I know, and anyone for that matter will ever know, Nan might have had the baby and let it cry to death because she couldn’t take time away from Paradise Lost to feed it. Speaking of Mistress Nikki, she tells everyone about the S&M gear in her room. She even brought the gear in the living room with her to show everyone in case they doubted her or couldn’t envision what she was talking about. With one suspicion voiced, another follows: Chaz is suspicious of Hal, who he thinks was acting weird when he burst in on him after Hal found the articles about the accidents, but Hal could make the claim that busting in on someone after finding those articles is equally suspicious. That is only an expressed suspicion; there must be on some level a general suspicion of Nikki, who has so far claimed she fucks on the first date, enjoys pain to the point of orgasm, and has a secret admirer giving her S&M gifts. Nikki and Chaz go upstairs, angry with the rest of the party and thus in the mood for sex they don’t want to share. Rob sits by the window to see the Constable. While they are upstairs, Nikki declares she is going to leave and never come back. This is news to me, as I never assumed she had any intention of coming back at all. Chaz, who is upbeat when he is alone with Nikki, tries to cheer her up by putting on the gimp mask that came with the S&M gear. He even has his mouth zipped, but this fails to put even a little smile on Nikki’s face. She storms off in anger, leaving Chaz in the gimp mask in the bedroom, unable to answer any questions anyone would ask when they saw him. Nikki shortly comes back in the room, and Chaz has his hands over his crotch as if wearing the mask has turned him on so much his penis has grown a little longer and he wants to surprise her with it. Nikki thinks this is a prank and gets more annoyed, slapping his hands away to reveal blood around his crotch that makes her scream. But I know that Chaz is in on the prank, and therefore know that someone else involved in the prank came in and told him about it, with Chaz listening to this through the gimp mask, and then convinced Chaz to act as if he castrated himself – all while still wearing the mask that prevents him from asking about specifics. Someone comes out of the closet while she is screaming, and the scene cuts. Hal is also dead; he just hasn’t yet been found. Rob reveals to Kit that the Constable told him none of them should be alone, and especially alone with Muffy, which he wouldn’t reveal to the other characters and thus give them a chance to further the mystery-hunting along before they died. With this information in mind, they search the house and find the dolls that were laid out on the dinner table in the attic. The dolls are identified as Arch, Skip and Nan, and are placed in a fishing bowl. The meaning is clear but unnecessary: Rob and Kit knew they were in the well and there is no need for a killer to remind them about that unless he needs the mental aid to remember where to retrieve them. There are also two dolls that I presume are Kit and Rob. The flare goes off to indicate Constable Porter’s arrival, which causes a scurry through the house to find the others. They only find Hal hanging from a door. And now Rob and Nikki are the only ones “alive”, and you can’t help but wonder: why them? They’re the most boring people in the movie, and their churning relationship – even without the med-school fiasco – doesn’t make them interesting enough for me to want to see them die. The answer, an oddly practical one for this movie, is that the other characters don’t have the intelligence to figure out who the killer is. Rob and Kit must solve a mystery because we must solve a mystery with them, whether we like it or not, and solve it after all the interesting characters are dead. After finding Hal dead they run outside and find an empty boat, so they run back inside where the dead bodies are although there was no mistaking the intentions of the doll display about what two dead bodies are next. They get the key to the boat, and inside the boat they find a notification that Miss St. John has escaped from a mental institution and is dangerous. They go down to the basement where Kit sees writing on the wall from which she deduces that Muffy has a twin sister named Buffy, who has been pretending to be Muffy and is killing all of her friends because she is insane. Muffy nails the window in the crawlspace down although Kit or Rob would have been easier to kill trying to get out of it. They run into the kitchen and lock the door behind them, which Muffy tries to open with a knife by sliding the blade up and down the slot in the jamb, which should give Rob or Kit enough motivation to take her on directly. Rob gets locked in a closet and then starts screaming as soon as he’s in there, which becomes the greatest annoyance in the movie with this one performance. Kit and Muffy have a chase, Muffy approaching Kit slowly with the knife as if she only came to the party to make fun of Nan and perform abortions, and she’s all out of coat hangers. Kit stumbles into the dining room where she finds all of her friends alive. I must say I pity Kit. She has spent the past five to seven minutes running for her life from a killer who has killed all of her friends, whom she now sees alive and learns that all of them, including the deranged killer, were part of a massive April Fool’s prank, and no matter how hard she wishes or how preferable it may be, she cannot return to running for her life. Meanwhile, Rob continues screaming. Buck pops up inside the closet and kisses Rob, which at least gets him to stop crying. Muffy explains the reason for the prank: as part of her condition to inherit the house, she must prove that she can afford it, and has thus turned it into a theme park where a murder mystery occurs that the guests must solve. Guests that, unlike the current ones, will be in on the mystery from the beginning to keep them from killing each other. This was merely a test run, which is sort of like letting people walk around Jurassic Park with all the fences turned off and not bothering to tell them there are dinosaurs in it first. The movie ends with Muffy finding a present in her bedroom after the gang gets drunk on champagne. The present is a jack-in-the-box, and after a clown pops out Nan comes from behind her and slits her throat. It is another joke of course, but it’s only funny if you didn’t want Muffy to die. |