April Fool's Day (1986)

I'm not sure exactly how to describe this movie. "Boring" is one adjective that applies. "Pointless" is another. But probably the best word that I can think of to describe this movie is "filler." This movie was loaded with filler -- pretty much the first half of the movie is nothing but filler.

We begin with a bunch of college kids boarding a ferry that will take them over to their friend's house on a nearby island. They're all a bunch of spoiled rich kids heading out to see their friend, Muffy St. John. Muffy is apparently her real name, as two of the characters have a lengthy discussion about this early on. This is just one little example of the filler in this movie.

It is apparently April Fool's Day, as per the title, as one of the characters goes around with a video camera telling people their fly is open. Har har, what a great joke. Later, a couple of the other passengers put on this elaborate joke, whereby one of them pretends to get stabbed and falls in the water. They all have a good laugh until the ferry driver's helper gets his head mashed between the boat and the dock (he was in the water trying to "save" the guy who was stabbed, you see, and inexplicably decided to stay there while the boat was pulling up to the dock).

He comes up screaming with his eye all mashed in and stuff, and the ferryman puts him in the motorboat that the local constable has conveniently just pulled up in and speeds off. So now the constable needs another boat to get back to the mainland with, and he asks Muffy if he can borrow one of her family's boats. "We keep all the keys on a rack in the kitchen, but that boat has extra keys under the seat," she says. I almost fell over at this point, because of the blatant infodump. Why on earth would she bother to tell the cop about the keys in the kitchen if she knew that one boat had keys under the seat? There is, of course, only one possible reason -- someone else, later in the movie, will need to take one of the other boats to escape from the island, and we'll all need to know where the keys are. It gets worse, however. When the time comes for the people to get the keys, they actually remind each other about what Muffy said earlier. "Remember when Muffy was talking to the constable? She said all the keys were in the kitchen!" AH! It's crap like this that sets a real movie apart from the crap fests on this page. A real movie would have had Muffy just go back to the house and get keys for the cop, thus revealing the location of the keys to everyone who needed to know. Plus, it would have had something more important happen during that time, to distract us from the fact that a whole scene had just been built around a bunch of keys on a rack. Not this movie, though -- oh no. Why bother with skilled filmmaking when you can just have out-of-place infodumps?

Anyway, from here to about the half way point, the movie is nothing but filler. Instead of moving along with the plot, everything comes to a grinding halt while the characters walk around, have dinner, talk about mundane things, make out, and numerous other things. Finally, later that night, some semi-interesting things happen -- but they're not explained very well and end up being almost inconsequential to the plot. Finally, finally, somebody gets killed (this is, after all, a slasher movie). It's the guy who was the knife victim in the elaborate joke early on, and apparently he's all upset about the guy who got hurt, so he's drank himself into oblivion and wandered around until he got offed.

But do things pick up from here? No, not at all. The next morning, we get to see everyone wake up, have breakfast, play soccer, do homework, have arguments, make out, and numerous other things until finally someone realizes that someone is missing. Filler, filler, filler. I swear, this movie is nothing but filler. It can't even rightly be called filler because it doesn't come in between more important things -- it's the whole movie!

So, since this is a slasher flick, people get picked off one by one until the end, when...oh, but I wouldn't dream of giving away the ending. Suffice it to say that if you bothered to pay attention to the name of the movie, you probably have some idea about what happens at the end. And it's all so amazingly stupid that it saves this movie from single turkey oblivion, earning it a turkey and a half.

Scene to watch for: The end scene.

Best line: "No luck here!"

Things that make you go "Huh?": Muffy?