April Fool's Day (2008)

If you're going to do a remake then this is the way to go about it. For starters, the original movie wasn't exactly a perfect film and it wasn't exactly universally loved. Getting some bright young things in front of the camera to be put in danger is a given but it's a plus when you get someone behind the camera like Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores (AKA The Butcher Brothers). The two men have already done some good stuff in the horror genre so I lift my hopes slightly when I see them attached to a project.

Taking the screenplay by Danilo Bach as a loose template (there are easy points of reference for those who have seen the original movie but this is also different enough to feel like quite a different beast), The Butcher Brothers also engage the help of Mikey Wigart in crafting something that's slick and disappointingly bloodless and amusingly ludicrous.

A prank goes horribly wrong and those involved find themselves threatened some time later. That's all you need to know. Yes, it's a mix of I Know What You Did Last Summer and the original April Fool's Day and Valentine. I don't care what you think of me, I LIKED those movies. I didn't love them but I liked them. Despite strong disapproval from almost everyone I know I actually really like Valentine (just such a great mix of old school slasher style and post-90210 teen sheen) so there you have my position on such glossy fare, for what it's worth.

April Fool's Day has some fun moments, and the cast has a couple of decent starlets in the shape of Scout Taylor-Compton and Taylor Cole, but it's all just a bit too bland to be solidly entertaining. The fact that it comes from The Butcher Brothers makes the tame nature of the movie even more of a disappointment and it's not helped by the rest of the cast - Josh Henderson, Joe Egender, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Samuel Child, etc - looking as if they have wandered in from the set of Cruel Intentions 5 or The Skulls 6 (both of which are sequels that I'm well aware don't exist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . yet).

I wouldn't go out of my way to see this again, and I certainly wouldn't rush out to buy it, but if it was on I could manage to sit through some of it. And if I see it anywhere at a bargain price I may well just have to buy it to satisfy my DVD-buying addiction.

5/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/April-Fools-Day-Scout-Taylor-Compton/dp/B0012OTRWA/ref=sr_1_2?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1342638801&sr=1-2

April Fool's Day (1986)

Hmmm, April Fool's Day is just one of those movies that you still can't help liking even while the realisation dawns that it's completely and utterly rubbish. It really is dire but it's dire in a goofy and endearing way.

Deborah Foreman stars as Muffy, a young woman who invites all of her friends to stay with her at her isolated island home for a weekend. It's the weekend of April Fool's Day and her friends need little encouragement to take things further anf further. They love playing pranks on one another, something that is clear from almost the very beginning of the movie. Door handles fall off, glasses full of drinks are rigged to leak, knife blades are retractable, etc, etc. Yep, there's never a dull moment at Muffy's place. And it's about to get even more interesting when a killer is added to the mix.

Written by Danilo Bach and directed by Fred Walton, April Fool's Day takes a risky premise and largely fumbles it by populating the movie world with a number of irritating characters and keeping everything surprisingly bloodless. Yet it does have humour in spades and the audacity of the whole thing is something to either go along with and enjoy or just allow to ruin your day.

The cast aren't great but Deborah Foreman is entertainingly over the top as the eye-rolling Muffy, Thomas F. Wilson is fun to see in a non-"Biff" role and Tom Heaton, Griffin O'Neal, Leah Pinsent, Pat Barlow, Mike Nomad, Clayton Rohner and the other actors make up the numbers and do what is asked of them.

April Fool's Day definitely becomes more interesting when you consider the context of the movie and not just the final result that ended up onscreen. The early to mid 1980s say the horror market completely oversaturated by the slasher subgenre. Spoofs had already appeared but the humour in this movie is more in line with the cool subversion of the Scream franchise. The fact that it doesn't quite work doesn't detract from it being one of the more interesting mis-steps in the field of slasher movies.

Worth watching if you're a fan of this kind of film from this decade but do be prepared for the ending to either make you smile or make you want to put your foot through the TV screen.

6/10

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