I don’t usually write two anniversary posts in one week, but I just watched the 1986 “slasher” April Fool’s Day for the first time (I know, I know, I’m a bad horror fan) and couldn’t resist. The film actually came out on March 28, 1986, so I’m a few days late for its 30th anniversary, but I thought it would be more appropriate to post this on April Fool’s Day in honor of this underrated gem.
***SPOILERS FOR A 30-YEAR-OLD FILM BELOW***
That warning may seem a bit snarky (it is), but seriously: if you’ve never seen April Fool’s Day stop reading now and just go watch it. Knowing the ending will completely ruin your enjoyment of the film and I’m definitely going to talk about its ending. That being said, I can’t point any fingers at someone who hasn’t seen it yet since I just saw it for the first time. My hope is that this article will get those people to go out and watch it (and stop reading before I start talking about the ending!).
The film is essentially a slasherized adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Add in some elements of 1984’s Clue (which is in my Top 10 films of all time) and the casting Amy Steel (arguably the best final girl in the Friday the 13th series) as the lead character, and you’ve got a rather brilliant film that was ahead of its time by about 10 years. Had April Fool’s Day been released in a post-Scream era, it probably would have been at least a moderate box office success and had positive word of mouth.
I don’t want to oversell April Fool’s Day. Calling it “brilliant” may be a little hyperbolic. It certainly contains many slasher tropes (such as a jump scare involving a cat) and the twist may seem obvious by today’s standards. Still, the film subverts plenty of the tropes it contains. The primary example of this is the character of Nikki (Deborah Goodrich), who could have easily come off as the typical blonde bimbo archetype (the whore), but ends up being one of the more endearing and intelligent characters in the film.
It’s not just Nikki though. Nearly all of the characters are likable, if you don’t mind watching a bunch of privileged white college kids goof around with one another, that is. The females fare the best, and while there aren’t any major backstories given to them these feel like people you may have known in college. Their conversations and mannerisms with each other feel organic (the sex quiz scene is a good example of this). You believe that all of these people really are friends. The men are all sort of douchey, but not in an “I really want to see that person get killed” kind of way.
While April Fool’s Day never takes itself too seriously, the moments of suspense are handled well. The scene with Nikki in the well and Kit’s final chase scene immediately come to mind. The gore effects are top notch as well, which is rather ironic once you get to the end of the film…
STOP READING IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE
April Fool’s Day managed to gross $12.9 million ($28 million in 2016 dollars). That’s more than double the $5 million it cost to make. Unfortunately, the film still managed to leave audiences confused and frustrated. By the time the big third act twist came around, audiences felt cheated. April Fools Day, after all, isn’t actually a slasher film. Nobody dies in the entire movie! As evidence by the lukewarm reception Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning received the previous year, audiences don’t like to feel cheated, and April Fool’s Day made them feel cheated.
Interestingly enough, the film was never intended to be marketed as a horror film, at least according to the film’s director Fred Walton. According to Walton, the reason that the film failed to resonate with audiences was because “Paramount didn’t know how to release it other than as a typical slasher picture. So most audiences came in expecting to see something they weren’t going to see and they were disappointed. It wasn’t marketed as something fresh and hip and fun.” Horror-comedy has never been an easy sell to audiences, and April Fool’s Day is just one of the many examples of that fact. Paramount was afraid to market it that way so they decided to play a prank on the audience, and much like any prank, it wasn’t well-received.
With such negative word of mouth, and with the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises beginning their creative and commercial decline, the slasher was deemed to be out of style. The extremely negative reaction to April Fool’s Day is a big reason why the early 90s were such a wasteland for slasher films (it was part of the “fall” in Adam Rockoff’s Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film), and that is a real shame.
One has to wonder what would have happened if the original third act, in which Muffy’s brother Skip (Griffin O’Neal) actually kills Muffy in order to get his father’s inheritance, had been included in the film. Would reception have been different? It’s difficult to say, but considering that would have been just one murder in the film, it may have been a case of too little, too late.
April Fool’s Day is not a perfect film. I would hesitate to even call it a great film, but it deserved a better reception than what it received in 1986. It certainly deserves to be brought up in conversations about slasher movies more often. At first glance it may seem like a cheap attempt to cash in on the holiday horror craze that took over in the 80s, but it is actually a lot smart than that. With that dear reader, I will leave you with this request: watch April Fool’s Day today. If you don’t, well, Jerry Whitman put it best:
