Happy April Fool's Day Witches!
No one knows for sure where the popular prank day started, but it goes back centuries. Ancient Romans celebrated Hilaria on March 25 with masquerades, parades, and general merry making. The Great Spaghetti Hoax of 1957 is one of the most famous pranks. Learn more about this prank here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax
How will you Witches celebrate this trickster's holiday?
The Night A SOCIAL-EXPERIMENTING ENTREPRENEUR Came Home: APRIL FOOL’S DAY (1986)
While Halloween is by far the best holiday, April Fool’s Day is one of the worst. Sure, it’s easy to dismiss its haters as sore losers, upset that they’re the ones always getting trick (though no one is ever able to fool me, of course... *awkward cough*), but often times, especially with the rise of “social experiments” (whose only social benefit is learning to ostracize people who do social experiments), it’s common for people to just be indecent or cruel to one another and act like it’s all okay with the utterance of the phrase “April Fool’s!” That just so happens to be the perfect lead-in to the next film of this series, 1986′s April Fool’s Day, which stars the guy who played Biff Tannen in Back to the Future, and a guy who would be played by Andrew Garfield if the film were rebooted today. In fact, if April Fool’s Day were to come out today, I would probably laud it as a fantastic satire of this abhorrent “prank” culture. Then again, that’d be thinking very highly of a film that thinks so little of its viewers.
The film begins with a group of college students waiting by the shore for a boat to take them to their friend’s private mansion on an island,. That very friend, Muffy St. John, meanwhile, sits in her mansion’s basement, playing with a Jack-In-The-Box, while the film flashes back to her receiving it as a gift at a childhood birthday party and being scared by the monster within. The scene actually sets up an enticing tone for the film solely through the score composed by Charles Bernstein, who perfected his take on dream-like childhood innocence with a hidden creepy and mysterious underbelly in A Nightmare On Elm Street. This film actually could be good!
April Fool’s! Haha, got you.
Any possibility of this being a hidden gem is thrown out of the window in the very next scene. Some more college students arrive at the dock to join those already gathered. The group includes three white, blonde women, which ensures I will not be able to keep any of the characters’ names straight in this film, since physical features are my guide when personalities are non-existent, as in this case. They load onto the boat, and begin to pass the time as they sail to the island. Arch (Biff Tannen) and his friend play a throwing game with a knife, only for the one to be accidentally stabbed, falling overboard with blood spewing out of his stomach.
The dockhand, Buck, dives into the water after him only to find.... he’s just fine. It was a fake knife with a strap, a prank pulled by the two men. April Fool’s. Aw man, they totally thought their friend was gravely injured, and jumped into the dangerous open sea to save him, only he was really fine! How hilarious!
The boat arrives at the island a few moments later, but Buck, whose still in the water from the earlier “prank”, has trouble roping the boat onto the dock, and ends up getting pinned between the two. He emerges from the water a few seconds later, his eyeball gouged out and his face shredded. But he’s fine! April Fool’s again!
Nope, wait. His eye is legit dangling out out his face. Weird, I said “April Fools” but this guy is still hurt. Huh. I guess I just don’t understand this pranking business yet.
Buck is quickly sped back to the shore for medical attention, as the group disembarks onto the island. They meet their host, Muffy, who has set up a dinner for them all. The dinner conversation quickly turns to the gang’s potential future, and the film actually lays the groundwork for some interesting thematic material. After it is mentioned that their teachers don’t think they’re taking their grades seriously enough, Arch remarks “How can anyone be serious if someone can push a button and nuke us all?” Well, when you put it like that, I suppose faking a death or two does seem awfully quaint in comparison.
So, the gang all decides to stop taking life so seriously this weekend, and the pranks begin! Whoopee Cushions are placed under seats, a chair is rigged to collapse, fake wine glasses spill the drink down people’s shirts! Hilarious! Harmless!
The pranks only get funnier from there! They all investigate their respective rooms for the weekend, and find pranks waiting there! Another breakaway chair waits for Arch! Genius! One room has a fake painting whose eyes move! Bravo! Someone finds heroin supplies in their bathroom cupboard! Um...okay! Another gets....newspaper clippings.... detailing brutal murders....?
Wait, what...?
One of the women gets......a recording of a baby’s voice coming from her closet...... because she's still emotionally processing her recent abortion......?
Um....April Fool’s....haha....
So while everyone else is settling into the nightmare house, goofball Skip goes off and instinctively finds marijuana growing randomly on the island. He heads into a lake cabin to smoke it, and is startled by a noise. “Who’s there?” he asks. A cat leaps out at him! April Fool’s! Then a hand reaches out to grab him! April Fool’s!
The next morning, Kit spots Skip’s corpse floating underneath the lake cabin. She runs up to tell the others. “He looked dead,” Kit states, adding, “unless he was joking!” Ah, yes! The classic “slit your own throat, draining all the blood from your body and color from your skin, and leaving your body in a secluded location for your friends to stumble upon, so they think you’re dead and there is a manic killer on the loose” prank! It gets them every time!
The guys head out to look for Skip. The first place they search is not the lake cabin where he was spotted, but the woods, because... only a fool believes a woman, amirite folks? Arch stumbles upon a rope trap and becomes suspended by his leg, as a nearby poisonous snake snaps at him. A person approaches him, presumably to laugh at him for getting scared by a life threatening situation like a fool.
One of the couples goes to the outdoor well and accidentally, or, who knows, perhaps as a prank, drop the bucket into the water. The girl, Nikki, climbs down to grab it, only to discover the bobbing heads of three of her friends! What a classic! Man, you should see the look on your friend’s face when you prank them with your decapitated head, and, if you’re lucky, you will before your optic nerves shut down for good! Her boyfriend falls in too after climbing down to rescue her, instead of using the rope right there to pull her up. Maybe he didn’t do that as a prank on her.
The film clearly begins to take form as a riff on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but, you know, if None was in reference to good parts. Clues to the killer’s identity begin to arrive, including a phone call eliminating dock-hand Buck. He was apparently the main suspect for the group thus far, the thinking being he wanted revenge for his eye, because, of course, murdering a bunch of teenagers is one’s go-to response to a unfortunate accident of one’s own doing. Fool me once, you know?
The remaining girl, Kit, discovers a picture showing a young Muffy next to an identical looking young girl. Her boyfriend, Rob, finds a letter indicating that a “Ms. St. John” recently escaped from a mental institution. These clues are a little too obvious, but I can’t think of any reason why we shouldn’t take them at face value, can you?
So, next thing you know, Rob and Kit are attacked by Buffy, Muffy’s secret twin sister. If you don’t want one of your twins to turn evil, maybe don’t give them rhyming names. Buffy begins to chase Rob and Kit through the house after they discover Muffy’s severed head in the basement. During the chase, Rob gets locked in a room, and Buffy advances on Kit, knife in hand. She strikes, but misses, and Kit stumbles into the next room. She looks up to find all of her dead friends... alive and well... laughing and drinking in the living room.....
Yeah.
April Fool’s!
Do you get it? All these psychologically traumatizing situations were a hilarious prank! She totally thought all her friends were being murdered off one-by-one by a crazed maniac! Hilarious! She thought she would be next! Too good! She’s going to need therapy now! Expensive!
So, Buffy, who actually still just Muffy (the secret twin being a set-up so obvious, that it was in fact obvious that there was no actual secret twin) sits Kit and Rob down, and explains it all to them. Muffy is about to inherit the island mansion, and she had to prove to her dad that she would be able to handle the taxes to own it. So she decided to use her past theater experience to stage “murder mystery weekends” at the mansion for guests, and she had decided to test out the business venture on her friends first! To be fair, it’s not the worst plan: I’m sure people would pay to send all theater kids away to an isolated island to torture themselves.
But wait, you say! What about all the severed heads and dead bodies? Props! That’s right, if you gave the suspension of disbelief to the film’s obvious prop work, you were the fool all along! Take that, movie magic!
But, wait! What about the poisonous snake that almost killed Arch? “I couldn’t have known there would be a snake there,” Muffy/Buffy says, completely unconcerned by her fun getaway murder-mystery house including the possibility of actual death....
But wait! Wouldn’t anyone who paid to come to this murder-mystery house know what they were getting into, so keeping her friends in the dark here doesn’t make any sense at all?
And wait! What was up with that extremely traumatizing recording of a baby played for the woman who just had an abortion? Is that going to be part of the normal package, or are those kind of details included at a premium price?
None of these questions, or the events that just transpired, seem to bother any of the group, who continue to laugh and drink and be best buds after subjecting each other to psychological torture! After all, it was just a prank! You can’t be mad, bro! They were all such fools! Or perhaps, I was the fools all along....
No, pretty sure it’s just a crappy movie, and its not done with us yet. The film ends with Muffy entering her room to find the Jack-In-The-Box from the opening scene. You know, the one that ended up having literally nothing to do with anything else that happened in the film. She turns the crank, and just as the Jack is about to pop, Nan pops up from behind her and slits her throat.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me six times...
Yep, it is, once again, a “prank”. Hysterical. This movie seriously has the gall to think it can pull this off after having the most nonsensical, insultingly stupid twist ending of all time.
The final shot is of the Jack-In-The-Box, lying on the floor. His eye winks at us, and the film fades to black. As far as Final Scares go, it’s not one. Unless this moment is meant to insinuate that the Jack-In-The-Box was manipulating Muffy all along into traumatizing her friends, which is the only possible explanation for why this toy is even in the movie at all. I stop caring after the knife prank about ten minutes in.
So, maybe April Fool’s Day is an ahead-of-its-time satire of “social experiment” culture, or maybe it’s just a cheap, manipulative, and entirely dissatisfying piece of dreck. Someone here is getting pranked by this film, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be sure who exactly it is.
April Fool’s Day is available to stream for free on TubiTV, and is on Blu-ray/DVD.
TOMORROW: The Night THE UNGAINLY SPAWN OF LESLIE NIELSEN Came Home....
