The Apple (1980)

Directed by: Menahem Golan
Written by: Menahem Golan/Coby Recht/Iris Recht

Last week, I saw one of the strangest motion pictures ever to grace the screen. No, I’m not talking about anything like Un Chien Andalou. This wasn’t Dali’s nightmare. More like Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s nightmare.

Young Bibi (the beautiful and…well…beautiful Catherine Mary Stewart) and Alphie (George Gilmour) are folk singers in the future. (1994, to be exact.) It’s a future where guitars are unheard of and singing without 400 backup musicians just doesn’t make sense. When they sing a love song at a contest, the crowd rebels. But then they listen…and they start to fall in love.

But they weren’t meant to be the winners tonight. BIM had to be the winners. BIM is a group put together with maniacal glee by talent agent Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal). He and his lead minion, Shake (Ray Shell), play a horrible screeching noise that makes the crowd rebel again, ruining Bibi and Alphie’s chances. BIM are victorious!

(BIM, however, are probably the worst band in history. Their square saxes didn’t help much.)

Of course Boogalow tries to sign Bibi and Alphie. But Alphie is suspicious of this rather Dr. Smith-ish douchebag. He doesn’t sign. But even his mighty David Hasselhoff meets JM J Bullock sex appeal couldn’t make Bibi see through Boogalow’s slime. The rest of the story is basically Bibi’s rise to fame and Alphie’s fall to Hippie Land.

What The Apple lacks in talent and storyline, it makes up for in garishness and absolute lack of sex appeal. And let me regal you with a bit of the lyrical genius that is The Apple:

“It’s the natural, natural, natural desire

Meet an actual, actual, actual vampire!”

At this point, said actual, actual, actual vampire rises up from out of nowhere, never to be heard from again.

And there’s always the ultra-non-sexy “I’m Comin’ Just For You” song where Alphie, trying to get to Bibi at the height of her success, ends up getting drugged and having sex with Pandi (Grace Kennedy), a member of BIM. Pandi sings and sings and sings, all while writhing away on top of Alphie in a pretty disturbing fashion. I haven’t been so disturbed by sex since Elizabeth Berkley mounted Kyle MacLachlan.

There’s really nothing good about this movie. The music is amazingly bad. (Listen for the “Somewhere Out There” call and answer song, “I Stand Alone.”) The sets are so busy as to be nearly annoying. The fashions ARE annoying. (And I think that the leftover costumes were mothballed and used again 9 years later for Back To The Future II.)

Lemme tell you a bit about the production of this movie. Cannon Films was kind of an up and coming production company in 1979. All kinds of musicals were coming out and becoming huge hits…so why not another one?!

Well, maybe if they hadn’t been trying so hard for a Rocky Horror Picture Show type of movie. They seriously thought that they would have a movie that would play for years and they would always have a continuous stream of money rolling in from it.

Too bad for them, they spent every bit of money they had on sets and extras. The extravagant premiere in LA included giving everyone who attended a copy of the soundtrack.

By the end of the movie, just about every one of those records had been thrown at the screen.

Yes, indeed. That’s how bad the music is. People didn’t even want to keep a free record of it. Golan and the Rechts (along with music supervisor George S Clinton…not he of the long dreads and pot habit, but he of Austin Powers’ music fame) fashioned a film that made people hate free stuff.

But here’s the thing: the movie is so strange, so over the top, so batshit, fuckstick, freakishly insane that I kinda loved it. I mean, where else can you see a Roger Daltry lookalike (Allan Love as the other half of BIM, Dandi) offer a giant apple to an innocent young girl, telling her “Let me be your guide through the Apple Paradise”? How could you not love hearing Miram Margolyes (the only actor to go on to anything else really sort of significant…you’d recognize her if you saw her) mince around as a Jewish landlady, saying things like, “You’re such a schlemiel!” or “Oh, my God, what happened in here last night, a pogrom?”

And The Alamo had a real treat for us last night. They had the original cut of the film, which hasn’t been seen since that fateful night of the record tossing! Apparently, this cut was accidentally found not long ago when someone was going to show it at their theatre. They asked for a print, but MGM didn’t have one to give them. Finally, they dug around and found a dusty old print. The theatre owner sat down to watch it and noticed that the rhythm was completely different from what he remembered. Then, at the end when God’s Hippies sang continuously for a year, he realized that this was a completely different cut!

Oh yeah…I didn’t even tell you about all of the religious overtones of the film. Boogalow, of course, is Lucifer. No doubts there. There are constant references to this, including shots of him in Alphie’s daydreams with one horn, sitting in a fiery cave.

But then, suddenly, about 10 minutes from the end, God is introduced! Mr. Topps (Joss Ackland, who is still making films) is a Sean Connery type character wearing long flowing robes, opened to expose his old barrel chest and a deep voice that commands the very hippies that he hangs out with. Hey, if there has to be a God, he may as well be a hippie leader who introduces them saying, “These are refugees from the 60s.” The end is one of the cheesiest religious cop-outs I think I have ever seen on film. It’s kind of amazing.

So, after sitting through an hour and a half of half-singers, weird Gamorrean guards (one of which was played by future Leaky Cauldron bartender, Derek Deadman), the first grill in cinema (Ray Shell’s teeth weren’t the creepiest part of him…maybe it was the golden underwear) and not so attractive people running around in less clothing than you typically see at the Playboy Mansion, I fell in love with another awful movie.

And then I hurled my plate at the screen.