April Fool's Day - DVD Review

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

One Disc
2.35:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
English Dolby Digital 5.1
English & French Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround
English Subtitles
Run Time: 88 Minutes
Keep Case

MOVIE
Rated R for profanity, violence, gore and brief nudity

By 1986, the slasher genre was becoming stale. Jason was already on his fifth entry in the Friday the 13th saga, Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives. (The keen observer will notice that my math is off, the even keener observer will recall that Jason wasn't the killer in the original, instead it was his mother, and if you're just angry and geeky you might point out that the killer in A New Beginning wasn't REALLY Jason.) The Nightmare On Elm Street series was ramping things up, confirming that audiences were looking for a different kind of slasher. Much like the teen comedy genre grew stale and then brought on the savage Heathers, the slasher genre was yearning for a movie like April Fool's Day that trashed its conventions and turned the genre in a whole new direction. Unfortunately, like Heathers, the film didn't turn the respective genres around, instead faded into obscurity in the theater and were found by fans on video as cult films. April Fool's Day did better than Heathers, taking in double its budget in the theater, but was pounded by Jason's outing and disappeared. Perhaps it's because of the holiday themed title. It was one of the last to use this convention, pioneered by Black Christmas and Halloween, then aped by countless films including My Bloody Valentine, New Year's Evil, Christmas Evil and to a lesser extent, Bloody Birthday. A trend pretty much abandoned after 1982. Also the bunch of teens stranded in an estate on an island with a psychopath was so And Then There Were None. In any case, people didn't see it, didn't know about it, and if you asked most horror fans about it, all they'd recall is that misleading cover with the girl with the noose braids and the knife behind her back. It's made to look like a standard slasher; it was sold as a standard slasher. But it's the interesting characters that make the movie stand out. That and a hell of a twist ending.
Muffy St. John (Deborah Foreman) is a privileged youth (and you'd have to be with that name) who has been left a house and island as part of her first stage inheritance. She's invited her friends from college to her island for an unforgettable Spring Break weekend that just happens to fall over April Fool's Day. The week starts off on a bad note when a prank on the ferry over causes a disastrous accident, horribly disfiguring the ferryman's assistant. Then, they're greeted by strange party favors hinting at pasts they'd like forgotten. Harvey (Jay Baker) finds news clippings of a car accident due to drunk driving. Arch (Thomas F. Wilson) finds paraphernalia of a heroine junkie in his medicine cabinet and Nan (Leah Pinsent) is greeted by a recording of a crying baby in her closet. These are unsettling, but worse is when people start disappearing one by one.
Yes, it does sound like a standard slasher, and it's sound silly, but the one major thing that sets it apart is the one thing I can't tell you about the film. So you kinda just have to see it. I will say, though, that the characters are interesting, and are played by more than adequate performers with a shining example being Thomas F. Wilson who most will know as Biff in the Back To The Future series. Also they're allowed to talk about their lives, something that you wouldn't think would be allowed in an 88-minute film. Never is something explicitly spelled out for the audience, well, not never, but rarely. Muffy's explanation of the keys in the kitchen and Kit (Amy Steel)'s stunning revelation are the two exceptions to the rule. Otherwise, the sordid details of this group of friends' pasts are implied based on their reaction to what they find in their room, and on their discussions of their relationship with Muffy. Watching it last night, for the umpteenth time, but for the first time in widescreen, I noticed subtle clues to the ending peppered throughout, bits of information we get about the people that leads us to the answer of this whodunit. Some people may sit and watch and proclaim that it is all phony and silly and trite, but to those of us, children of the eighties, who allow ourselves to be given over to a fun story in a fun location with a delightful ending. Well, two delightful endings, actually. And it's this kind of movie that makes me nostalgic for the old days; the heyday of horror, when slasher was king and the world was different.

VIDEO QUALITY
Well the video probably looks the best it ever has. It surely looks better than my video copy ever did. It's presented in 2.35:1 Anamorphic widescreen and has been cleaned up vastly from earlier prints. A major benefit of the widescreen is you don't see the godawful video superimposed titles that had to be placed in the center of the pan & scans on the VHS release. As a whole, the picture is very dark, but in the 80s, for some reason, natural looking lighting was much more common in horror films, so when people are outside at night, you don't see much of them at all, certainly not the "night lit" scenes of horror movies these days, or, god help me, scenes shot "day for night" and then just darkened, a la Jaws. The blacks are black, and they're everywhere. The video does look a bit washed out, however, but it was shot on a fairly low budget and it's over fifteen years old, so I'll give it a break.

AUDIO QUALITY
The audio transition from VHS to DVD was not nearly as impressive as the video. The audio doesn't improve much on the VHS stereo, resigning most of the track to the front two speakers and center, with little ever going to the back except for an occasional stray sound effect that may have gotten lost and wandered back into the rear channels. Otherwise, the fidelity is good, though doesn't have a wide range. You don't gain much more with the 5.1 than you get with the 2.0 track, in a nutshell.

EXTRAS
Okay, what the hell is wrong with Paramount? Even their special editions are basic editions by any other studio. This is their version of basic edition. It touts interactive menus as a special feature and doesn't even have a collectable booklet. To top it all off, we don't have a damned trailer on here! Don't tell me one couldn't be found or you didn't have the rights, Paramount. Don't lie to me like I'm your bitch. Get your head out of your ass and follow MGM's trail with their $10 special editions with commentaries and documentaries. Is that so hard? You have one of the biggest libraries in the business, with so many unreleased movies...and so help me if the Indiana Jones movies even closely resemble some of your more recent releases, I just may have to cause an avalanche on that mountain of yours.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
So what I ask is that you try to leave your preconceptions of this film at the door when you view it and you might be pleasantly surprised by it. There's a lot more here than you'd glean from looking at the cover art or the synopsis on the back, but because it's another one of Paramount's travesties of a DVD release, I'd definitely rent it first. You have to love this movie as I do to pay the hefty asking price and not get any special features save a bonus insert with the chapter numbers on it.