The Apple: One of the strangest films, ever.
Movie: The Apple (1980)
Directed By: Menahem Golan
Starring: Catherine Mary Stewart, Allan Love, Joss Ackland
Written By: Menahem Golan
Sweet tapdancing Christ. My fellow B-movie cohorts, Mr. Heinrich Maneuver and Miss Luna, dropped a fucking bomb on me this week. When you’re offered a biblical disco musical about a Village People-fueled dystopia, you run with it. While this movie is firmly lodged in the Rocky Horror tradition, The Apple is a more kinetic, possibly creepier, certainly more bedazzled upgrade.
This is a tale of two Canadian kids who come to the big city in order to ply their pansy ass Carpenters act against the tide of Nero-sized disco. The evil BIM corporation, ruled by the sassy yet diabolical Mr. Boogalow, (yeah, I know,) is not amused. Flanked by his cadre of black drag queens and fluffy-haired Roger Daltrey impersonators, Boogalow puts on his best Klaus Nomi tuxedo and sets to work absorbing the heroic Alphie and Bibi into his infernal system. Following a hellish ripoff of “The Time Warp,” Bibi succumbs to the BIM allure. Alphie, however, runs away like a little girl, and spends a good 15 minutes mooning around in a nice Jewish woman’s New York tenement (and serenading her, and groping her sweet rack). Nobody in the biz wants to listen to his wussy tunes, and the law is cracking down on him for not wearing his BIM mark of the beast. What’s a sad panda to do, but storm back into BIM Central, sleep with one of the disco ladies, and then bust through a pane of glass, lit up in green lights and looking like a crybaby Incredible Hulk? Magnificent!
The best parts of this movie are the BIM anthem in the beginning, and the ending. And though the opening song is one big bowl of tossed ass-kick salad, the conclusion to this masterpiece may have the posterity of being one of the worst (and most glorious) endings of all time. In literature and theater, the term deus ex machina (“God from the machine”) refers to a sudden ending that defies the logic of the rest of the story. South Park’s Crab People would be an example. In this movie, deus ex machina can be taken literally, down to the flying car. What happens is one of the most baffling finishes to a film that I have ever seen, made only slightly tolerable by the most evil dude from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey playing God.
Wow. This film is friggin’ amazing.
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