April Fool's Day (1986)

Is it a movie or a prank? It's both! It's a Morank!

Ah, April Fool's Day, the Johnny Knoxville of holidays. Between the pukin' of St. Patrick's Day and the punkin' of April 1st, this is traditionally the most annoying time of the year, and I'm not taking it lying down. Which is why the upcoming sequel to Better Living Through Bad Movies has a chapter (who knows, maybe two or three chapters! I'm way more easily annoyed than I used to be) about dumb holiday movies. And just in case you missed it, I started my Butlerian Jihad against holidays at the end of last year, with:

By the way, I’m currently in the market for a really execrable Valentine’s Day movie, so if you have any suggestions, please drop them in the comments below. Also Arbor Day’s coming up; there’s gotta be some evil tree movies, right? Maybe The Happening…?

Anyway, on with this week’s abomination…

April Fool's Day (1986)
Directed by Fred Walton (the Walton boy nobody said Good Night to)
Written by Danilo Bach

We open on a dock in New England, where a group of young slasher fodder goof around with a video camera as they await the ferry. If this were ten years earlier, they'd all be bit players getting eaten by a shark in a much better movie. Alas, we're deep into spiral perms and popped polo shirt collars, so these are our stars, and they've elected to spend Spring Break running from cutlery in their underpants.

Meanwhile, on Slasher Island, Deborah Foreman from Valley Girl is struggling to shift a mannequin from one side of her basement to the other while telling her middle-aged housekeeper to take the weekend off, because—no offense—she's got cellulite and chin hairs, so nobody wants to see her die in a camisole.

The crusty old ferryman docks his crusty old ferry, and our cast of aspiring corpses scamper aboard so we can spend the ride getting to know them. First up is Chaz, the videographer, who's played by that one guy who was the spiky-haired, Sunglasses at Night type in a variety of 80s teen flicks.

He tells every male he sees that his fly is open, and tries to get the repressed, hairband-wearing blonde to ditch her copy of Paradise Lost and read his raunchy stroke magazine. He seems nice, and I feel confident he’ll live a long and happy life. There's also Biff from Back to the Future, who's paired up with Tatum O'Neill's Brother in a manly game involving a switchblades and yoga stretches. Then there's Bland Blonde, Sarcastic Blonde, Big Blond Guy, Southern Fried Guy, Richard Marx Guy, and many, many more. They’re all such rich, vivid characters that I’m sad to realize the film will have to occasionally interrupt its exploration of their complex inner lives to dice them up with a chainsaw.

Biff and Tatum O'Neill's Brother get in a squabble and Biff impulsively throws the switchblade, impaling Tatum’s Bro, who topples into the water. Everyone dives in to save him, because they all apparently forgot the title of the movie they're in. It's actually just an elaborate prank, which sets up the film's theme of reality versus illusion, and makes us doubt everything we see. I'm even beginning to wonder if this is a mid-80s slasher film, or if it's really a drawing room drama about the Bronte sisters, and at the end everybody will pull off their acid-washed denim and reveal sausage curls and Empire waists.

Everything's fine, except Big Blond Guy insists on staying in the water so can get crushed between the dock and the ferry. His plan works like a charm, but instead of reducing his body to a paste, the multi-ton vessel just squeezes his head until one eye rockets out of its socket and dangles like a pendulum from the optic nerve.

Constable Potter is pissed, and immediately commandeers Valley Girl's boat to take Blond Guy and his Clacker-like eyeball to the mainland, leaving her and her friends stranded on Slasher Isle. However, the house where they'll all be staying is lovely. It’s a classic Cape Cod, with Canadian maple floors, a rustic fieldstone fireplace, and a boathouse perfect for getting impaled—first recreationally by your boyfriend’s penis, then fatally by a rusty harpoon. (Note: if your pet name for your boyfriend’s penis is “the rusty harpoon”, please stop.)

Cut to suggestive close-ups of wieners and beans, as Sarcastic Blonde reads aloud a Cosmo quiz about orgasms (it's multiple choice, so you don't have to have one if you don't want to). They all gather in the formal dining room to scarf beans, sip Cold Duck, and humiliate each other with Whoopee Cushions. All except Tatum's Brother, who feels so guilty about turning Big Stupid Blond Guy's eye into a testicle that he’s started to drink heavily and perform selections from Fifty Great Monologues for Young Actors).

Now let's settle in as our cast of wannabe worm food is pranked one by one. Sarcastic Blonde finds a dog collar and leash in her dresser. Repressed Blonde finds a tape recording of a crying baby in her armoire. Biff finds a complete set of intravenous drug paraphernalia in his medicine cabinet. It's like TV's Bloopers & Practical Jokes (specifically the classic episode where they tricked William S. Burroughs into cooking his heroin in a dribble spoon). Meanwhile, Tatum’s Bro wanders into the dark boathouse and gets scared by the creaky floors. Then a stage hand throws a cat at his face, which happens so often when one walks into a dark scary room that our cat has asked that we just keep the lights on, because he's tired of spending so much time as a projectile.

Valley Girl apparently has a second personality, because the next day she abruptly goes from a fun-loving, prank-pulling co-ed to a lugubrious creep who talks like Mrs. Danvers from Rebecca and dresses like a sister wife. Meanwhile, Bland Blonde and Richard Marx go have sex in the boathouse, but her mind wanders during intercourse and she peers through the floorboards just as Tatum O'Neill's Dead Brother floats by on a door. Naturally, they all run into the woods to search for him, even though he was last seen on the water, because nobody said they were smart.

Well, we're almost an hour into the film, and so far the only action we've gotten is an eyeball that swings like a pendulum do, and a cadaver on a raft. But things perk up mildly when Biff steps in a snare and dangles upside down while a rattlesnake repeatedly head-fakes him. Then Sarcastic Blonde falls down the well and finds Biff’s and Tatum O’Neal’s Dead Brother’s disembodied heads bobbing in the water, because as we all learned in school, the skull is the most buoyant part of the human body.

Meanwhile, Southern Fried Guy pulls a revolver out of his luggage and prepares to exercise his Second Amendment right to be the sole survivor. Since he's struck out with every girl in the cast, he's probably a virgin and therefore qualifies.

Sarcastic Blonde decides to pack up and leave, which means she’ll immediately die. On the bright side, everybody’s been killed off camera, and she's heard that—like drowning—it's one of the most peaceful ways to go. Chaz tries to talk her of it by putting on a leather bondage mask, but she leaves the room for just a moment and wouldn't you know it, he suffocates and gets his penis stolen.

Richard Marx and Bland Blonde find a weird diorama in the attic, and realize Valley Girl has been playing Ten Little Indians, except with Barbie dolls. My sister used to do the same thing—there’s just something about Barbie and her friends that brings out the torture porn director in every little girl. Naked and dismembered, that’s how they like ‘em! I don’t think I ever saw Ken and his head in the same room.

Richard and Bland Blonde find that Southern Fried Guy has been hanged, in a twist reminiscent of The Twilight Zone, or Far Out Space Nuts ("I said lunch, not lynch!")  They run down to the boat, but the keys are missing. Fortunately, the screenwriter has left behind a note explaining that Valley Girl is actually her evil twin sister who's been in an institution for the past three years, and if anyone wants him he'll be pounding down Fuzzy Navels at Boardner’s.

Richard accidentally locks himself in a closet just as Valley Girl goes after Bland Blonde with a machete, and is reduced to screaming "I love you! RUN!", which is usually the kind of sentiment I reserve for Valentine’s Day. Blandie narrowly avoids getting her head chopped off and stumbles into the living room, where the entire cast, alive and re-capitated, are chattin' and chillin'. Meanwhile, Big Blond Guy, his eye still swinging like a tetherball, somehow teleports into the closet with Richard and kisses him full on the mouth. (Which reminds me that Star Trek never fully exploited the prank-pulling potential of transporter technology. Imagine the April Fools Day fun on the Enterprise as Scotty impishly teleported Chekhov into the Womens showers! Or Sulu into the Mens showers! Or split Kirk into two separate people, one that’s good, and one that’s evil. Or one that’s a good actor, and one that’s a bad actor. Granted, the proportions wouldn’t be equal, and the good actor would probably be the size of Warwick Davis, but still. Just imagine the freeze-framed laughs on the bridge afterwards.)

Back in the living room, everyone yells, "April Fool!" It seems Valley Girl was test marketing her franchised chain of Who Dunnit? dinner theaters, nobody's actually dead, and it's time to party! The cast showers each other with Asti Spumanti while blasting Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not To Come" (if only it had been playing the night their parents conceived), and Chaz celebrates getting his penis back by simulating oral sex with one of the decapitated heads.

Well! Okay, then. Shall we join the screenwriter at the bar? It's been like 30 years, but I have a feeling he's still there.