Some might question April Fool’s Day’s inclusion as a holiday, but since there’s a horror movie of it, I’m back with another YNTE Horror Night Holiday Special. Today we’ll be watching 1986′s April Fool’s Day, a title that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the film.
As always, tons of spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned!
Right off the bat, I notice that this movie is produced by Harry Mancuso Jr., the man behind all the Friday the 13th sequels. To be honest, I had a sort of bad taste in my mouth still after watching Leprechaun, so I’m hoping this movie will be more to my liking.
This movie starts off pretty typically, with a bunch of partying college students going off to an island to party over Spring Break. For fun, on the boat over, two of the guys start playing a game where they throw a switchblade at the ground, and apparently, each other. One dude gets stabbed in the gut pretty badly, and falls backward into the water. A bunch of people jump in to save him, only to find out: April Fools! It was a fake knife and he’s perfectly fine.
Instead, one of the people who jumped in after him gets not-fake chopped up by the boat’s propeller. Whoops!
You might think that this would derail your weekend, but they all seem to forget immediately that their friend was just horribly disfigured. Not only that, but these people are all in full on 4th grader mode. Whoopie Cushions, glasses that spill drinks when you try to use them, chairs with bendy legs to drop you on the floor; these guys spend all of their time doing unoriginal, puerile pranks to one another.
Then, there’s the exploding cigar, the spraying faucet, the painting with the eyes that follow you around, the “fake heroin equipment”, the pull-off doorknob, the tape recorder of a baby crying, and the light bulbs that don’t turn off. I’m not sure if this is a horror movie, or just an hour and a half of America’s Funniest Home Videos bloopers.
Finally, at about the halfway point, a guy gets killed. Off Camera. This movie has had so many opportunities so far to be a slasher flick and has just ignored them. It’s a bit baffling.
The group realizes Skip is missing. They realize this when two people fucking see his corpse floating. So the group decides to split up and go look for him. In the woods. THEY LOOK FOR HIS FLOATING CORPSE, WHICH THEY JUST SAW IN THE LAKE, IN THE WOODS.
Arch, the douche who pops his collar to masturbate (literally) is off looking for Skip in the woods, when he walks past a snake that is coiled up, ready to bite. Rather than getting bitten, though, he steps into a trap, his ankle gets caught and he gets pulled up into the air upside down. Then the snake bites him in the face. Then a man walks up and stabs in. Okay, movie – I’m back in!
The water to the house randomly shuts off, so two of the idiots go out to a well to get some. The drop a bucket in, then a flashlight, then a woman. The woman starts screaming though when 3 dead bodies suddenly start floating that weren’t floating just a second ago.
Everyone makes it back to the house, where they immediately start turning on one another and blaming the girl who owns the house(“Muffy”, and that’s her real name, not a nickname or a shortened version. Her parents named her “Muffy”) because she looks creepy. Apparently all the “pranks” from earlier (the crying baby, the heroin, the news clippings of car accidents) were all very personal to the people who they were done to (for example, the girl who found the crying baby tape had secretly had an abortion previously). It would have been great to know that at the time they showed it, the scene would have been more emotionally investing than a prank montage.
So rather than staying together in the big room like they were told by the sheriff, they split up so the killer can pick them off easier. The next one to die is Chaz, who is trying to turn on his girlfriend by trying on S&M gear. She leaves the room briefly, and when she comes back, his dick’s been chopped off. Seriously!
So, of course, true to form, everyone but the last two(Rob and Kit) gets killed. The last two almost escape, but not before they realize that it’s not Muffy who’s out to kill them, it’s her twin sister Buffy, who just escaped from a mental institution.
So Rob and Kit get chased around by crazy Buffy for a bit, and burst through the doors into the living room to find… everyone alive? Apparently the whole thing was pretend.
It turns out that Muffy really did inherit the house, but needed to find a way to make it profitable, or she would lose it. So she did the only logical thing and converted it to a murder mystery Bed and Breakfast. But before she opened it to the willing, she did a test run on her unwilling friends. And rather than responding by saying “What the fuck, you BITCH. I literally shit my pants in terror” they laugh it off and get drunk.
All in all, a nice change of pace! I’m back, which is good, because I’m doing literally 8 of these this month. No joke!
Catch up on past installments:
Leprechaun
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Valentine
Jason X
Jason Goes to Hell – The Final Friday
Friday the 13th Part VII: Jason Takes Manhattan
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