Talking Shit About Movies - The Apple
Perhaps it’s my upbringing with Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I have an unhealthy obsession with bad movies. Those robots and that guy taught me that even in the worst of movies there is entertainment to be had. Since then I’ve built up a small collection of Japanese monster movies and campy American classics. My wife doesn’t understand it, and I could never put it into words. I don’t just like bad movies. It needs to be a special kind of bad. The kind of bad when you know someone put their heart and soul into making the movie, be it the actors, director, screenwriter, whomever, and woefully missed their mark. A tired movie that recycles lame jokes and has actors sleepwalking and mugging their way through a performance, something like The Love Guru,or Meet the Spartans, for example, both of which I refuse to watch, doesn’t get any love. But something like Point Break, featuring the wooden Keanu Reeves and god among men Patrick Swayze attempting to share in some bro-love on the other side of the law? That’s something over which I could wax rhapsodic. I think it’s the earnestness involved. If you’re half-assing it I can’t love it. But if you’re really trying your best I can love it and appreciate what you were trying to do, all the while laughing at your misfortune on the way.
At the AV Club, writer Nathan Rabin spent a year (and decided to extend it) revisiting movies that crashed and burned in a series entitled My Year of Flops. Finally, here’s a person that got where I was coming from. He gives movies that were critical and commercial failures another look through eyes that aren’t tainted by overwhelming critical disapproval and attempts to reevaluate them on their own merits. Often times the movies are still shit (Failures), but there are also gems that may have missed a note or two (Secret Successes). But the best of them all are the Fiascos, the movies that reach, reach, REACH for the stars, but fall flat on their face in one or many facets. This is a tale of one of those movies.
Right when I was really getting into this series of articles, Rabin reviewed The Apple. The description blew me away. In fact, it blew me away so much that I really don’t feel like I can do the movie justice on my own, so here’s a link to his article. If you choose to bear with me, I’ll provide my insights and reactions to the movie, but this guy is a fucking Apple scholar.
The plot is pretty simple. In the future, the future? of 1994 (this was released in 1980 after all), two pure of heart Canadian singers (Alphie and Bibi) enter the Worldvision Song Contest. I’m not really sure what the prize is, maybe “best band in the world.” I don’t know. Unfortunately for Alphie and Bibi they followed contest ringers The BIM Band, led by brother and sister Dandi and Pandi (a white dude and a black chick, so racially their parents must be pretty cool). The BIM Band, who I would go see on a moment’s notice for all the money I have in my wallet at any time ever, is the rockingest fucking band I’ve ever seen in my life. They have a guy who plays the split keytar and everything. Suck on that, Alphie and Bibi. Evil music magnate Mr. Boogalow, played by some guy that looks like a fey(er) Philip Zimbardo, rigs the contest so that the BIM Band wins. Pretty good for him, since he’s the B in BIM, Boogalow International Music. But the evil Mr. Boogalow sees something in these kids, maybe it’s just their innocence, or the fact that even though their song is gayer than eight dudes blowing nine dudes the crowd still loves them, but he tries to woo them into the BIM fold by tempting them with Dandi and Pandi. Alphie says no thanks, but Bibi says “aw word” to the low rent offspring of Roger Daltrey and Davy Jones that is Dandi, leaving Alphie off on his lonesome while she engages in (simulated) sex, drugs and (awful, show-tuney) rock-n-roll. Thus concludes act one.
By this point in watching the movie, you’re going to think a few things. The first one is “holy fuck.” Yeah, that’ll probably hit you around the three-minute mark. Then you’ll think “for fuck’s sake, this is a lot of singing.” Strap yourself in, buddy, because this is a gaudy-ass musical complete with the lamest songs with the worst lyrics you’ve ever heard. Take this gem, for example: “It’s a natural, natural, natural desire/to see an actual, actual, actual vampire!” Is it really? As with all approximations of the future, it’s easy to see them as comically naïve. Is everyone really going to dye their hair to look gray with red splotches and streaks? Are their cars going to be just as stupid looking as 1970’s cars, but with big wings and funny adornments? Okay, yes. In the future that really happens sometimes. Are people really going to listen to music like this? Hear you this! I have seen the future that is 1994 and the answer is no. In many ways it’s much worse, but not until Limp Bizkit becomes popular in 1996 or so.
Act 2 sees our star-crossed lovers in two different stations in life. Bibi is the latest hitmaker in Mr. Boogalow’s BIM stable. How a folkie waif turned from Linda Rondstadt light to Tina Turner’s character from Beyond Thunderdome’s extroverted white cousin can probably be blamed on the drugs and Dandi’s dong, but sure enough there she is, singing about America’s addiction to speed, presaging the rise of NASCAR from backwater hillbilly timewaster to front-page hillbilly timewaster. Or was that in reference to drugs? Shit, I still don’t know. But this movie made me wish I had drugs, or at least made me feel like I had taken drugs.
Alphie, on the other hand, is struggling in his little room trying to make good music in the face of crass commercialism and pining for Bibi. He lives in the house of the woman that plays Professor Sprout from Harry Potter, the chick that kind of looks like one of the monsters from The Muppet Show. He even grabs her tits, too. Yikes. He gets rejected by the powers that be at BIM, and seeks out Bibi. He searches for her at a party at Mr. Boogalow’s, gets drugged by Pandi, and everything turns into a hot tranny mess. Literally, there are trannies everywhere, everyone looks like a mess, and I bet it’s hot with all of those people crammed in there. Pandi seduces him, leading to a really awkward and stomach churningly weird musical scene with numerous simulated sex acts with dudes packing major pipe in banana hammocks. I may have blacked out at this point. Obviously freaked out by this freak out, Alphie runs away and joins a hippie commune.
Are you still with me? Are you feeling confused? Nauseous? Do you think my writing is disjointed? Now you know how I felt watching this movie. It was the longest ninety minutes of my life.
The movie concludes it’s third act with Bibi rejoining Alphie at the hippie commune. They magically have a baby that looks about two and a half with a full head of hair in what appears to be no time at all. Boogalow brings the goon squad to reclaim Bibi, but the hippie chief turns into God, comes into town in his holographic gold Rolls Royce, and saves the day by leading his hippies, and our beloved Alphie and Bibi along with their miracle baby, to walk off into holographic heaven. I guess it’s hard to find where you park a holographic car.
Seriously, I couldn’t make any of this up if I tried. All of this shit happened in a single, ninety minute movie. I made hardly any jokes or exaggerations at all. Without a hint of hyperbole, The Apple is the most over the top movie I’ve ever seen. It is too much everything. Too much singing, too much dancing, too much glitter, too much bad acting, too much future, too much trannies… And it’s not like it was some independent filmmakers lark, either. This movie is an actual MGM studio release! Studio execs greenlit this shit! They must’ve spent a FORTUNE in all of the dancing extras. Do you think dancing nuns dance for free? DO YOU??!??
Now, strip away all the glittery, Vegas revue show tranniness of the whole thing, and what’s left? A timeless story of the pure being tempted by evil, and seeing that it will ultimately leave you empty and unfulfilled, an allegory on the evils of conformity and the homogenization of culture, a cautionary tale against excess. Yes, The Apple is all of these things. But by showing us these things wrapped in a glittering, shimmering wrapper you may not leave the movie with those lessons learned. You’re probably going to be like me, and think “where can I get one of those fucking keytars?” And you may recognize the irony of a movie that seems to champion the simple life being the most excessive piece of cinematic trash that you’ve ever seen. But what it does have in spades is the aforementioned earnestness. Someone really felt the themes they were trying to convey in The Apple. The director, who ironically also directed the classic Stallone arm-wrestling movie Over the Top, was truly uncompromising in his vision. What can I say about the originators of this story? The phone number for the Betty Ford Center is 1-800-434-7365. Call them up and get some help to kick the habit. I cannot begin to fathom the amount of drugs these people ingested thinking up this movie. Be it a function of budget or fried brains, The Apple is chock full of some of the weirdest imagery I’ve seen in a movie. And God bless them for it.
All this being said, The Apple could be the ultimate bad movie. I can’t imagine there will ever be a movie this fucked up and grandiose released by a major studio ever again. The folks at The Apple really shot their wad with this one, and blew it for everyone else in the process. This is why you won’t see Crispin Glover’s movies about retards having sex in a Regal Cinema, so we have these folks to thank for that, too. Do I recommend this movie? I guess not for everyone. But if you read this and thought “now I have got to see what the fuck that is all about,” I think you’re exactly right. You do have to see what the fuck that’s about. Because no amount of prior reading is going to get you ready to watch this shit.
But a couple of tabs of acid, an eight ball, and a bottle of champagne just might.