April Fool’s Day review.
April Fool’s Day takes a risk that makes total sense for the time it came out…but will annoy people looking back for some 80s slasher fun. 1986 was a wild time in slashers…and this movie is part of the reason why.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
April Fool’s Day
Directed by Fred Walton
Written by Danilo Bach
Starring Amy Steel, Deborah Foreman, Thomas F. Wilson, Jay Baker and Clayton Rohner
April Fool’s Day Review
We find ourselves back in 1986 once again. A year notable for being the exact moment that slasher movies got tired of themselves. As a result…we saw the first attempt at course correction within a genre most known for its repetitive nature. April Fool’s Day appears to be yet another variation on the holiday horror trend…but its chosen holiday should give away the game pretty quickly.
Here’s the weird thing about April Fool’s Day…not everyone got that hint. It’s a movie that sits at a strange crossroads. Some people are nostalgic for it…others look back on it and remember the disappointment that it is all an elaborate prank. Part of that is because of the 1986 aspect of the release. Slasher fans like slasher movies. The first movies to mess with that formula were always going to face resentment from the more hardcore fans.
It really calls into question who the movie is for. The only people who are going to buy a ticket to April Fool’s Day in 1986 are slasher fans. Specifically the ones who are still, somehow, not overwhelmed by the sheer number of them released in the last five years. Making a movie that intentionally pulls the rug from under the core audience is an interesting choice. Of course, given the title of the movie…it’s also a clever one.
They weren’t attempting to launch a new franchise here…so it doesn’t really matter if the people its aimed at liked it or not. You already got their money, after all. And there are plenty of positive remembrances of the film from that era. It’s a slasher movie you could show your friends or significant other who doesn’t like these kinds of movies.
The question is how well does it hold up once you know the secret. There are no deaths in April Fool’s Day. One you know that…”death” scenes cease to be seen as an artistic choice to cut away before the violence. April Fool’s Day does that a lot. It has to in order to preserve the twist. Once you know the twist…you’re left with a movie lacking the gore and kill scenes the core audience demands.
So then, April Fool’s Day becomes all about that twist. It’s one of those very clever ideas that works as long as you don’t think about it at all. Now…most of the complaints about Muffy St. John’s (Deborah Foreman) elaborate prank are actually explained away in the wrap up monologue. Essentially, she’s performed a trial run on a plan to host a murder mystery experience for guests at her lavish estate. She explains that the actual experience will have more safeguards in place than this weekend’s adventure did. What this doesn’t fix is the actual danger that she repeatedly put her unaware friends into throughout their stay.
Someone probably should have been very injured over the course of April Fool’s Day. None of her friends know that this is a controlled situation until they are “killed” by Muffy and agree to play along. As they run through faux dangerous scenarios the cast of characters find themselves faced with a snake, running through rooms and almost falling down wells. It’s a miracle Muffy isn’t losing her estate in a lawsuit.
That cast is likable enough. Led by Friday the 13th Part II’s great final girl Amy Steel and filled out with “hey I know that guy” actors like Thomas F. Wilson and Clayton Rohner. Everyone is a bit more developed than a standard slasher movie…which makes sense since this isn’t one. The movie moves pretty slowly for the first two acts giving us plenty of time to get to know the characters. Characters that, appropriately, love to pull pranks. It gets a bit annoying…but the actors appear to be having a blast and you can feel that come through the screen.
April Fool’s Day remains a strange movie to this day. It’s surprisingly stylish but also feels very empty. That’s mostly a side effect of…well…nothing is actually happening. You can see the care put into making it…but it’s doing so for one watch that might end up annoying the person watching it. As a prank…it’s a good one. As a movie…well…it depends how you feel about being pranked.
Scare Value
As we talked about in our review of Chopping Mall, 1986 is an interesting year for horror/slasher movies. This is when they started to turn the corner on acknowledging the silliness of the genre. Everyone from Jason Voorhees to Leatherface was changing their tone to a more comedic take on the material. The genre wasn’t mature enough to lace in a meaningful examination of itself yet…instead it was choosing to have fun with the audience. April Fool’s Day goes a step further and has fun at their expense. Just like it spells out in the title.
3/5
April Fool’s Day Links
Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu
Rent/Buy on VOD from Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
April Fool’s Day Trailer
If you enjoyed this review of April Fool’s Day, check out some other 80s horror movies: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Blood Rage and Halloween III: Season of the Witch
