The Apple

As you may have judged from some of my previous pages, I like 80s movies that very few other people either do or have heard of. I'll watch most anything 80s and like it, but even I have my exceptions. "The Apple" is one of them...It's a movie that's watchable the same way a car crash or an eplileptic child is. It's that bad!

It's no small feat considering that "Can't Stop The Music" was also released that year, but this has to be the worst film of 1980, if not the 80s altogether.

Here's a brief plot description...I'm deviating from the norm on this review, so the real stuff is coming up.

Alphie and Bibi (Gilmour and the always excellent Stewart, the only good actor in this movie) are pop singers from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. They enter a music contest in the oh-so-distant year of 1994, and lose it to the duo of Pandi and Dandi (Kennedy and Love), but gain a contract with a devilish figure named Mr. Boogalow (Sheybal). He promises fame and fortune to the both of them, but only Bibi takes the apple (literally, in a musical number to be described later). Now, with Alphie and Bibi split by fame & fortune, they must get back together somehow.

That's the plot, sort of like the Biblical tale of Adam & Eve, only with nothing good or moral to recommend it.

Now, some lowlights of this P.O.S:

The musical numbers. There's one every 2 minutes...LITERALLY! These aren't good songs, either. These songs are on the level of what you sing at Summer Camp, only their overbearing stupidity is magnified to the size of the Empire State Building. An example is the musical number mentioned earlier. Dandi sings a song about taking a bite of the apple in order to achieve success. This would be no problem if the song were cleverly written, but it's not. Instead, the song takes the apple metaphors FAR too literally, complete with a prop apple being tossed around back and forth. Another is a song about...well, I can't state it on this, a family website, but suffice to say once you hear it, you'll wonder how this movie escaped with a PG rating.

The choreography. This was made in 1980, a dark time between the end of disco, the first fourth of New Wave and the beginning of rap music, every musical form of which has a type of dancing to go with it. This movie must not have gotten the memo from those radio DJs in 1979, and so we're treated(?) to a bizarre type of disco dancing that would have Steve Rubell going in for the kill with one of Tony Montana's guns. The movie was made by Golan-Globus...Look at it this way. "Breakin'" has dancing on the levels of the Bolshoi compared to this movie.

The production design and costumes. Okay, so 1994 wasn't very futuristic. Still, guys, you could have tried a little harder. Attaching fins to cars and cones to baby carraiges isn't exactly "Star Wars"-level work.

The actors...With the exception of Catherine Mary Stewart (a woman who always is a great actress, no matter what movie she's in), the cast is very bad. Not in terms of singing (their voices are relativelt credible) nor dancing (it may be bad, but it's pulled off without a hitch relatively), but in terms of delivering lines. Of course, with a script where no lines really stand out, you're pretty much bound to come up snake eyes no matter what.

This movie is bad...It makes "Ishtar" look like "Raging Bull".