Census Bloodbath: Everyone's entitled to one good scare

APRIL FOOL'S DAY

Thirteen Halloweens.  That's sinister, don't you think?  And that's how long we've been crossing over with Brennan Klein of Popcorn Culture in the Old Switcheroo, where for the duration of October he supplements his ever-burgeoning encyclopedia of the slasher, Census Bloodbath, with a takeover of our own wholesome 50s sci-fi feature, Cardboard Science, while I get the sharper end of that bargain here.

1986

Directed by Fred Walton

Written by Danilo Bach

Spoilers: severe

Of the slasher films on the downslope of the fad in the latter of half of the 1980s, there are of course still a fair number held beloved by the slasher fan; but even amongst those who look down on the genre, and believe that it used up whatever cinematic value it had almost immediately, only securing a renewed lease on life thanks to the unique (but copyable) genre-busting classic of A Nightmare On Elm Street, will still make the occasional exception; and possibly the single most popular of these exceptions is 1986's April Fool's Day.  I think you'd see why right away.  It starts with an odd formal gambit (that isn't going to be a constant companion, nor even reappear) of a home video, plopped into the Panavision frame and contemporaneously-filmed by one of the characters.  Its overt function, which it humorously fails at, is a partial cast introduction; its only-slightly-less-overt function is immediately getting the stupidest, most slashery line of dialogue out of the way (condensed, it's "My name is Mary O'Reilly O'Toole O'Shea... and I fuck on the first date," and we needn't belabor why that's "slashery" though it bugs me to not be sure whether it's Nikki (Deborah Goodrich), who's attempting a bit, who misapprehends what the "ASP" in "WASP" stands for, or if it really is our screenwriter, Danilo Bach).  But it has a secret function, suggesting this movie might be "about filmmaking," which won't be apparent for a good long while.  So if this gesture doesn't do much of anything "right away," then I'll direct your attention to next "real" shots on this dock, after the frame has expanded to fill the 2.35:1 aspect ratio (if nothing else, they've demanded you notice how they're using the more prestigious-seeming format), because while all they strictly needed to do was "establish this ferry, the only access to an exclusive island," they've placed the camera on one enormous crane, the better to capture their location's coastal quaintness, essentially compelling you to agree, "fine, April Fool's Day, you're a real movie."

In between, this sensation persists even in a basement, where another character's doing stuff.  The stuff isn't too important (though it has a hint of menace to it), but the afternoon backlighting certainly is.  It means even these not-too-important shots are going to be well-composed and lovely, thanks to cinematographer Charles Minsky, who went on to have a legitimate A-picture career, and nonetheless probably shot his best-looking movie (only his second) right here; and if well-photographed basements are the prerogative of horror, good cinematography in general is even more the prerogative of horror that's taking itself seriously, and, no matter with how much irony, April Fool's Day is positively taking itself seriously.  Next, this character—Muffy St. John (Deborah Foreman), heiress to this basement, the mansion atop it, and the whole island on which they sit—finds an old toy, a jack-in-the-box, and intercut with her wistful winding of the machine are her memories of getting it for her birthday nearly two decades before (and, yes, Minsky has ensured this flashback is fuzzy and "aged," so as to set it apart and give it the right mood).  Meanwhile, Charles Bernstein, himself formerly of Nightmare, is doing practically the opposite of his Nightmare score, all pensive and subdued.  If we have the littlest familiarity with this genre, then we know what we're likely seeing is the moment a psychology was forever deformed; and the nerve-wracking winding finishes, whereupon a scary goblin pops out and the little girl screams in terror.  Now, some of this is a tad theoretical—the goblin isn't that scary—but this is, whatever else, very much symbolic of Muffy's particular deformation.  And with all these things, April Fool's Day has set its baseline: it may seem trite and formulaic, down to staking itself on one of the last "holidays" nobody had claimed yet (I'm sure you'd be right to doubt they hadn't); but even so, by slasher standards, it's classy.

Classiness will remain a constant companion: director Fred Walton is going to construct it awfully well as a mystery-thriller, and on a line-by-line basis Bach is neither reinventing "slasher dialogue" nor trying to, but the middling sex comedy is going to be a couple notches better than usual here, and it's going to be noticeably better-performed.  To some degree, of course, just by being a movie about rich kids it's locked itself into being "classy," since renting rich person locations and building rich person sets costs more money (five million 1986 bucks), even if these particular rich kids are not especially classy themselves.  Which, for the record, they're not: but what I'm not going to be doing is approaching this as a commentary on Reaganite America, because I don't really think it is one—in fact, the bluntest feint towards this, regarding a rich boy's daddy issues, that's also the movie's bummest acting note, somehow isn't any more interesting once we understand his real story—and even if in the end it could've been slightly more of a class satire, and that would've been an improvement, I think it's otherwise for the best.  Above all April Fool's Day must be watchable, and it's simply moreso when it's taking its characters as it finds them, and what it finds is simply the more articulate, sitcommier (complimentary) version of a cast that would've been perfectly at home in a Friday the 13th, with the minor exception that they'd never have taken those jobs.  Speaking of Friday, you might've seen a couple of familiar names in its opening credits, including that of Paramount producer Frank Mancuso Jr, and I find that interesting too, when at this point Mancuso had grown tired of the franchise his father gave him (oh), even trying to end it, albeit with no greater success than his heroines, so a run-of-the-mill slasher seems like it'd be the last thing he'd have wanted to make.  I can see how he would've found this one appealing, however, even before the other shoe drops, with its sense of being like a Friday, except upscale and less eager to wallow in its own trashiness.  For his part, Bach (who barely had a subsequent career and was known in 1986 only for, of all things, Beverly Hills Cop) had no professional connection to slashers at all.  So from minute zero, maybe it's already a slasher for snobs, by snobs—though Walton, who directed When a Stranger Calls in 1979, had been there to prototype them.

And all of that is nothing but the prerequisite to the actual reason the snob embraces April Fool's Day, and the reason I embrace it now.  It's because April Fool's Day has a twist—an all-timer.  That twist even explains why it had to be classy, as a matter of pure logistics (the most forceful complaint from slasher fans is its bloodlessness, which is ultimately complaining to a brick wall stretching from horizon to horizon, because there's no way around it); yet it made it pretty damned incumbent on the rest of the movie to be good.  I was supremely fortunate to have not been spoiled on this twist, and more fortunate still that I'd forgotten being told there even was one, since I'm sure I had been.  That twist, you see, is the most fragile and delicate thing, one that's breaking a little bit under its own weight already—I didn't even touch it yet—and just saying, "there's a really special twist," can't help but give it all the way away.  Especially when the movie is already called what it is.  It's April Fool's Day.  What the hell else would it be?

But to play this prank on slasherkind, it must keep the straightest face, and to an astounding degree it does.  So: it's April 1st and spring break for the students of what will later be clarified to be Vassar, and Muffy—which is short for nothing, not even muff-diving (I may have spoken too soon about "most slashery dialogue," but, indeed, isn't that part of its subterfuge?)—has, on the cusp of graduation, invited seven of her friends out to her family's island.  Some of them are already friends themselves, and some of them are strangers to one another: Nikki, whom we met earlier, and does in fact fuck on the first date; the designated goofball Arch (Thomas F. Wilson); the pervy goofball with New Wave characteristics Chaz (Clayton Rohner); the level-headed Kit, whose personality isn't defined by stereotypical defect or attire (hence our likeliest Final Girl, even if Amy Steel's resume recommended her already); Kit's depressed boyfriend Rob, whose application to med school just got rejected (Ken Olandt); Muffy's prim, buttoned-up friend from theater class Nan (Leah King Pinsent); Muffy's garrulous, golddigging Texan friend from econ class Harvey, whose insistence that his friends call him "Hal" only proves he's made none this weekend (Jay Baker); and Muffy's second cousin, apparently, the edgy Skip (Griffin O'Neal), who notes the date and gets the festivities kicked off with the first prank, when an annoying game he's playing with his switchblade turns into what looks like manslaughter for Arch.  It was all in good fun, of course, though some of them got wet when they jumped off the ferry to "save" him.  It is for this reason that deckhand Buck (Mike Nomad) doesn't bother getting back on the ferry, and attempts to tie it to the dock from where he is, and instead gets grievously injured when this, surprisingly, doesn't work out.  And there's, like, a second here where you wonder, "Is this another prank?"

Some of the kids briefly blame themselves—Skip especially—and though it really wasn't their fault (Buck's dipshittery provides such a clearly-cut example of "an intervening cause" he belongs in a torts textbook), it does naturally cast a pall over the forthcoming get-together, so that the endless bombardment of physical gags that Muffy has prepared for her guests—unbalanced chairs, exploding cigars, a superbly-enervating trick with the lights that could've been resolved immediately by any intelligent person, so it turns out Rob was no great loss to medicine (just unplug the lamp, dude)—are as likely to abrade them as they are to delight them.  (They're still pretty funny to us.)  Even then, most everyone, besides Skip, is trying to have a good time.  Unfortunately, Buck has blamed them, so when they begin to disappear—when bodies turn up, starting with Skip's—they come to believe that the mutilated deckhand has returned for his revenge on all these stuck-up preppies.  They're wrong about that, and considering that Muffy's acting stranger and stranger, it's not a twist for us to learn that the danger is closer than they thought.

This isn't flawless; the messiness that sticks in my craw is the more personal-seeming jibes Muffy's made with tokens left in some (a frankly clumsy-feeling four-out-of-seven) of her friends' rooms, which are neither really "pranks"—"you seem to have caused a fatal car accident, haw-haw!"—nor matter much, besides Nan's abortion, which motivates actions that would've been motivated regardless; and this would go to "Muffy is actually a monster, hiding behind a jester's facade," but then that starts poking at That Big Twist, so let's save it.  Besides this, it's very good, anyway.  The cast are better-characterized than you'd expect, with even the most stereotyped finding a good angle for their stereotype (Wilson might have the least definition, but he's Biff, so he has the biggest personality, and there's something amusing about the designated goofball being out-goofed in pursuit of April Fool's Day's elevation of a Slasher Flick Prankster to its villain).  The non-stereotypical ones, so mainly Kit and Rob, even get angles on their non-stereotypes, notably a very nice scene in this slasher regarding the healing power of sex, even if they have the bad luck to get interrupted by Skip's floating corpse.

Then we're off to the races, with the remaining six friends marooned on this island with a murderer, increasingly distraught by its constantly dropping population.  It's a good thriller on the Agatha Christie model—Christie is namedropped, amongst others (did you know they've been to college?)—and that speaks well of it as a thriller, given how it's going about being a slasher.  Now, there's a good reason for this, but what it'll have convinced you of is that it's being withholding for bad (or, at least, snobbish) reasons: the classy horror film does not rely on gore.  It plays that trick surprisingly well, considering that, despite its snootiness, one of its slasher attacks involves throwing a cat at the victim first for a nominal jumpscare.  Some of this is the creepiness that keeps working its way in—the hoary "moving eyes" painting that's still unnerving, and somehow moreso when the cat clock that was behind it turns out to glow in the dark; the idea that somebody with childhood trauma went to the trouble of making little toy effigies to commemorate her victims' deaths—but more than anything, I think, it's succeeding because instead of blood it's decided to excel on another slasher metric that I might value just as much, namely terrifying body discovery, and, since it can't show you death, what it is going to show you is the dead.  It's astonishingly effective at getting frights out of this, starting with Skip's gray waterlogged body glimpsed between the slats of a boathouse, and not remotely peaking with that, considering the horror Walton and editor Bruce Green are going to get out of putting Nikki down a decaying old well, a scene that keeps escalating to the point it might now be my favorite slasher flick body discovery.  And it has, yes, also tricked you: turns out it can have gore, and you were right to be preemptively disturbed by that dumb old painting (not to even mention the terrific bloodletting in the epilogue, right before a perfect final frame gag).

And then there's that twist, the climax—more appropriately, the mind-breaking anti-climax—of a severely intense Final Girl sequence, where Kit stumbles into the living room and finds all her friends just hanging the fuck out, such a shock for her (maybe this is the ultimate "body discovery") it throws their dialogue into preternatural silence, though the real grace note, if not the punchline, is poor Rob bellowing declarations of love for his doomed girlfriend from behind a locked kitchen door.  Or it's when Buck comes back and pelts him with his disfiguration makeup.  It's a prank—every death was a prank on its victim, the reveal that Muffy's "evil twin" "Buffy" "broke out" of the "asylum" was a fabrication (given that this is probably the best slasher to ever use that silly recurrent trope, this is undoubtedly the meanest joke it makes at slashers' expense), and even Buffy's knife is a prop knife.  Of course, this is already wonderful sport for its own sake, but just as obviously, what April Fool's Day is doing with it is peeling back the skin on the slasher movie, with Muffy having effectively made one of her very own, using her vast resources and her vast carelessness to deploy all the tricks of the trade to play the ultimate prank.

So, though let's only whisper this, because I love it so much, and it's so gossamer I could hurt it: it doesn't entirely work.  It lies to you at least once (Skip's "death" comes very close, but I refer to the little-known fact that living bodies need to breathe); it's completely unbelievable that Muffy convinced every "victim" to join her team, especially without offering them sacks of cash; it's not all that believable that she had time to prep all of them, before their assistance as a "dead" body became necessary to her plot.  And, actually, this is almost harmless: a slasher satire might not even be complete if it didn't feel, itself, a bit sloppy.  But this twist is, by necessity, an act of pure bravado, and so it can't afford to ramp down its energy or lose its nerve, and it kind of does: it starts explaining this shit, like it needs it to make sense in material terms, expositing, at such length you're worried the spreadsheets are coming out, Muffy's financial position regarding her island and her grandiose plans for the murder mystery weekends that'll pay for it, which makes less sense than if she explained herself absolutely not at all, and this was just her idea of funny joke, while her awful friends, once brought into her conspiracy, also thought it was a funny joke.  So it's needlessly degraded—only slightly, but when I already worry that this plays extraordinarily once, then never quite so well again, a degradation of the purity of its prankster's spirit seems like more than it should have to bear.

Yet even if my suspicion's true—if this offers only one utter joy of a watch—it's still a treasure.  I called it "slasher satire," but that must be the wrong when it's "satirizing" slashers with such profound generosity.  It's a critique that is, foremost, a defense: gently explaining that, for all the slasher's morbidity and cruelty, for all the real feelings of fright and sometimes even grief it can elicit, for all the outrages and controversies it caused then and still causes now, we were, always, only playing.

Killer: Nobody

Final Girl: Functionally-speaking, Kit and Rob

Best Kill: The only thing it could be, really, is Nan's vengeful "slitting" of Muffy's throat right at the end—likewise a prank, but it still got you, didn't it?

Sign of the Times: According to Nan, epic poetry ala Milton is merely dying

Scariest Moment: The seemingly never-ending corpse repository in the well

Weirdest Moment: Skip eats a leaf off some random plant

Champion Dialogue: "Respectable young Quaker couple returning from quiet afternoon of nonviolent sex."

Body Count: 0

TL;DR: It's all fake and nobody died.  Might as well read the whole thing.

Score: 8/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)

2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)

2022: Tarantula (1957) The Amaizing Colossal Man (1957) Journey To the Center of the Earth (1959)

2023: Invasion of the Saucer-Men (1957)

2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)

2025: X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963) Earth vs. the Spider (1958)  The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

2026: The Deadly Mantis (1957) The Black Scorpion (1958) ??? (1957)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Visiting Hours (1982) Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988)

2026: Prom Night (1980) Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) April Fool's Day (1986)