Applecart is one of those movies that by all means seems like it would be a success. Conjuring-universe veteran Joseph Bishara composed the score for the film, first-time writer/director Brad Baruh hired his old John Dies at the End buddy Kenton Drew Johnson to be his DP, the cast consists of several very capable actors, including Brea Grant, A.J. Bowen, Chase Williamson, genre icon Barbara Crampton, and the synopsis essentially reads like a female Jack Torrance who goes mad and unleashes blood-soaked terror in the powdery white winter mountains upon her close family and friends. On one hand, Applecart may be setting itself against some pretty great odds by crafting a close comparison to the immeasurable genius of the late Stanley Kubrick, but at the same time, it should at least turn out to be somewhat entertaining simply because it provides such a fun little premise. Sadly, these apples prove to be nothing but sour.
In the film, loving wife and mother Casey Pollack (Brea Grant) hauls her loved ones out on a trip in the country in the hopes of helping her husband, James (A.J. Bowen) who has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Supposedly, the ground where they are headed has healing powers, and with the support of her two children Jason (Joshua Hoffman), Jessica (Sophie Dalah) and Jessica’s best friend Amanda Tate (Shauna Case) at her side, Casey’s hoping that this time away from the pressures of the outside world will do her husband some good – maybe even save him. Little does she know, there are far greater threats that lie within the icy cold of the hardened woods than anything she might be running away from back in the city.
What follows is a slasher that slowly reveals itself as a supernatural thriller. Casey takes her family out to the woods and, as the movie quickly tells us, kills her entire family – or did she? See, what’s happening is two storylines are running at the same time. The first is being told in real time, so we’re just following Casey and her family while they go to the mountains and settle into their cabin while strange events begin unfolding. The second storyline is being told through a fake crime TV show spoof called “Inside Crime: The Pollack Case”, in which a narrator talks in detail about the gruesome murders that crazed mother Casey Pollack committed against her entire family. It recounts each and every stab wound while stock footage of prison doors slamming shut play lazily onscreen, only pausing every now and then to play videos of a nearly catatonic Casey recounting her crimes in a distant voice that hardly sounds like her own. Both accounts are telling the same story, just from different perspectives, and the parody TV program actually proves to be a relatively funny gag until it overstays its welcome and ruins the entire finale for you.
[Related] All Fantastic Fest 2017 News and Reviews
Admittedly, there are a few standout ideas here. The fake TV show not only is a creative jab at familiar true crime shows, but it only provides the clever angle of the unreliable narrator because the version that the police are telling the police is that Casey went nuts and started randomly attacking people, while the real-time actions of the events show us that malevolent spirits in the woods are actually preying upon her family and framing her for their ill deeds. However, because the show does accurately describe all of the injuries that the Pollack family suffers in its report, you know exactly what is going to happen to every single person in the house so absolutely nothing is a surprise and the ending feels extremely anticlimactic.
There’s one scene in particular that works really well, which is at the beginning when daughter Jessica becomes possessed in the kitchen after one of the creatures from the woods digs some sort of curved talisman into her back. The chaotic events unspool so quickly in that moment, as she collapses upon the table, reanimates, and begins to rise to her feet, twitching in a wicked unnatural manner, as if she were actively battling the rigor mortis that’s steadily taking over her body. For a minute there, some real panic threatens to take over.
Unfortunately, the little suspense that the film manages to drum up is quickly snuffed out as the messy yet somehow still very predictable story unfolds. The creatures in the woods cease to be frightening as soon as they remove their masks, the music feels off and far too ground for such a simple feature, and the kids who are cast to play Brea Grant’s children look like they’re close enough in age to actually be her best friends rather than her offspring. Applecart may have started out with the potential to be an intriguing callback to The Shining, but in the end, it barely even manages to serve as a fun slasher. Barbara Crampton deserves better.
