MB Blog Anonymous Reader Appreciation Day: April Fool's Day

After my April Ghoul's blog, it was brought to my ghoulish attention that I missed over an apparent April gem: April Fool's Day

April Fool's Day is a 1986 horror film directed by Fred Walton (who also did the original When a Stranger Calls). The cast is a bunch of people from 80's awesome movie royalty (actually, to be fair, when I first started writing this, I hadn't even seen the movie yet, so I put "a bunch of people that I've never heard of" and upon seeing it, had to change it immediately in the middle of watching it because of the all-star team in this movie)....First of all, there's Amy Steel, who plays Ginny in Friday the 13th Part II (You, know, the one that puts on the dead-and-headless Pamela Voorhees' sweater and uses her "child psychology" college education to distract Jason).

Does the pitchfork ring a bell?
Amy Steel ALSO is in Walk Like a Man (just learned that now).

Aside from Steel, there are two...not one...but two characters from Just One Of the Guys-the one that plays Deborah, and the one that plays love interest Rick; Biff from Back to the Future; and Larry from Summer School.

Anyway, I decided to check it out...and while it couldn't be the first blog of the month...we're going to close out April Ghoul's with April Fool's Day (The Movie!)! When have you known MB Blog to be conventional with horror? Don't answer that- And off we go!

Ok so first of all, I have to come clean that seeing this trailer, despite it's awesome Top Gun music in the beginning, is so horrific and terrible that it nearly completely deterred me from seeing it:




But I pressed on. I mean, it's considered a "cult classic" after all, how bad can it be?

Basically, the movie starts off as most 80's horror films do...there is a heap of college students all gathering together for some kind of graduation or spring break party at some rich snob's (Muffy St. John...how much more snobby can you sound?) house. Everyone has to take a ferry over, and one of the friends gets seriously injured and is taken away.

Everyone is very jilted by this, but they press on to Muffy's pad and are greeting with some practical jokes set out by muffy-a whoopie cushion, this awesome chair that folds back and you spill out, et al.

Next, people start going missing and showing up dead. The survivors are trying to figure out "who done it?" and it turns out that Muffy's insane twin, Buffy, has escaped and killed Muffy and that the host is really Buffy, not Muffy. Wow, what a mouthful!

So now it looks like Kit (one of the remaining girls) has lost her boyfriend somewhere in the mix and is running for her life. She runs into the living room, where all of her "dead" friends are sitting on the couch waiting for her. She's in disbelief...and soon, boyfriend ends up in the living room too and sees that everyone is alive and fine. It turns out that Muffy has been practicing for some kind of weekend murder-mystery event to help keep the estate open. Everyone was in on the joke except the two "survivors". This must be the "twist" ending I'd heard so much about.

Anyway, the movie seems to have reached the end and Muffy goes back to this Jack-in-the-Box that scared her as a child and she decides to make it open up...and as she does it...some girl that you hardly see throughout the movie comes up behind her and slits her throat! Whoa! Oh, wait...no she didn't...it was just another April Fool's!

There was a remake to the movie made in 2008:

starring Scout Taylor-Compton (who played Laurie Strode in Rob Zombie's Halloween), but it was released straight to DVD, and apparently, wasn't that good.
Here's the trailer for that, sorry the sound isn't too great...even though the movie looks far worse than the quality of sound:




Overall, this movie was kind of an un-scary-scary movie. Nobody actually died, so you can leave feeling good about it, and the idea behind it was pretty clever. Jim hated it though, so he kept trying to fast-forward it. After he named what other movies all of the cast members were in, he completely lost interest, which made the movie lose some of its luster for me.

Seriously though, I wish I had a friend that could do Hollywood special FX makeup...my Monster Bashes would be even greater! Muffy is one lucky rich snob.