AM1200 (2008) – Get ready for the
live feed. Haunted by recent events and on the run, a man finds himself the unwitting
pawn of a possessed evangelical radio station and like his unfortunate predecessor
must ask himself whether it is better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. AM1200
is a 2008 thriller film starring Eric Lange, John Billingsley and Ray Wise. It
focuses on Sam Larson, an executive who is on the run after the suicide of his
friend and co-conspirator in a scheme, Harry Jones. While driving along at night
and trying to stay awake, Sam turns on his car radio to the A.M. band. Cocky
investment analyst Sam Larson has a lot on his mind. After a financial scam
goes horribly wrong, he hits the road in a desperate bid to outrun his guilt. A
fragment of a radio broadcast that may or may not be a distress call lures him
to an isolated transmitting station and into a terrifying mystery of murder,
madness and the insatiable hunger of a power beyond his comprehension. After a
little embezzlement by financial business person Sam Larson leads to the
suicide of Sam’s boss – who rather ironically was also the person who put the
whole idea into his employee’s head – Sam goes on the run, driving across the
USA in the sort of blind flight across highways that has never ended too well
in any film. At night, the broadcast of a religious nutcase radio station turns
into a sort of emergency call, pleading for anyone hearing it to come to the station
and help out with some sort of medical emergency. Sam’s not planning on
answering the call but ends up at the radio station regardless. Inside the building,
he finds the aftermath of a fight (though strangely no bodies) and a man, probably
the DJ/Preacher handcuffed to a radiator. It is obvious that something terrible
and deeply strange has happened there. A skillfully rendered thriller about a
hotshot investment analyst who leaves town in a hurry after a financial scam
goes terribly wrong. But the isolated highway leads him into an even more
terrifying situation and madness and murder.
AMATEUR PORN STAR KILLER 2 (2008) –
Humiliation, rape, murder. You know the drill. Shane Ryan’s sequel to the disturbing
Amateur Porn Star Killer is a brutal calling card to all those who were enraged
by its predecessor (and there were many). Ryan is a force to be reckoned with
and he’s not letting up any time soon. The victim here isn’t a young girl. This
one doesn’t just go quietly either. She fights back. She knows she’s in
trouble, but she mistakenly thinks she can get away. In other movies, she would
escape and somber music would play as the credits creep up the screen. The audience
would leave the theater satisfied that the bad guy got what he deserved. They
would go home feeling safe. Ryan doesn’t let anyone have such notions. He shows
things as they really are. This is what a killer would film. This is how it
would look and if you didn’t know any better, you’d swear it was real. (And you
still can’t be totally sure it’s not.) Amateur Porn Star Killer 2 is not a
rehash of the first film. It’s a continuation, the next step in Ryan’s world of
raw horror. It has transcended the label of exploitation cinema and now has its
feet firmly planted in the wet ground of artistic snuff. Bothered yet? In a
little over an hour you will be and you’ll hate Ryan for it. Ryan with the
first APSK, eradicated the boundaries of acceptable cinema. With this film he’s
taken over the territory and it’s doubtful any other director has the guts or
skills to snatch the kingdom away from him. Prepare yourself. This is going to
leave marks. – Doug Brunell A killer (Shane Ryan) posing as a porno director
lures an unsuspecting beauty (Kai Lanette) to his dungeon of death. Amateur Porn
Star Killer director Shane Ryan continues to shock and offend with this faux-snuff
follow-up to his controversial 2007 debut. Brutality knows no bounds when a killer
posing as porno director lures an unsuspecting beauty to his dungeon of death.
But this actress isn’t about to go down without a fight and when she realizes
she’s signed on for her final role she strikes back against her attacker with
everything she’s got.
Amusement (2008) – Your torture,
your pain, your fear, his amusement. While being interrogated by a police psychiatrist,
the near-catatonic Tabitha tries to explain why she and two of her childhood
friends are being hunted by a serial killer. The truth that’s dying to come out
weaves together three tragic secrets from their past. Two of the girls’
boyfriends become unwitting targets in their deadly game. Three women. Three separate
lives. Three unique versions of fear… which become a single journey into terror.
Laura Breckenridge, Katheryn Winnick and Jessica Lucas star as three ordinary
childhood friends now being stalked by a serial killer whose decade’s old
hatred is about to become murderous in this terrifying thriller. Keir O’Donnell
and Tad Hilgenbrink play their unwitting boyfriends drawn into their wide-awake
nightmare. Three women fall prey to a killer who carries a childhood grudge
against them.
Three lifelong friends, Tabitha.
Shelby and Lisa are being stalked by a psychotic serial killer bearing a grudge
linked into a seemingly innocent incident from the women’s school days. In the
name of revenge, the deranged killer has invented the most brutal and sadistic
games for his three victims to play. Can they possibly get out alive? When
three females are brought together as part of a malevolent plan, their worst fears
soon become a terrifying reality in a dark thriller from writer Jake Wade Wall
and director John Simpson. A traumatized woman being questioned by a cop and a psychiatrist
realizes that a clown, a hotel and a convoy could hold the secret of stopping a
relentless serial killer before he strikes again. As children they were best
friends, as adults Tabitha, Shelby and Lisa have wandered separate life paths.
Now, inside a chilly prison chamber, three women and a group of other potential
victims must fight for their lives or lie down and die for another’s amusement.
As retribution a psychopathic stalker
known only as The Laugh attacks the now adult girls who picked on his sick childhood
tendencies. Tabitha, Shelby and Lisa become the target of a madman with a
serious adolescent grudge. The film opens with yearbook photos of three girls,
Tabitha Wright, Shelby Leds and Lisa Swan. Each girl proves to have great
potential, as their senior superlatives respectively describe them as “Most Likely
to be Famous”, “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Most Likely to Shine.” As well as
the girls, the prologue introduces photos of an unnamed boy and clippings of a
psychological profile which describes him as “extremely dangerous.”
SHELBY – While on the highway,
Shelby Leds and her boyfriend Rob Alerbe pull over for gas, joined by a semi-truck
and a Jeep. At the gas station Shelby sees a frightened woman in the truck’s
back window, though Rob does not see her and tells Shelby that the trucker said
he was driving alone. On the road, the same woman jumps from the truck and lands
on their car. The truck continues onward as Shelby, Rob and the driver of the Jeep
stop to help the woman. Rob then drives after the truck to get its license
plates but fails to catch up to him and returns only to discover the Jeep
driver injured, with Shelby and the woman missing. The Jeep driver says the
trucker took them and they take the Jeep to an old, isolated house. The Jeep
driver goes alone to the front door, where he overhears the trucker talking on
the phone, claiming he is the woman’s father and that he was taking her to a rehabilitation
facility for a drug addiction. Meanwhile, in the Jeep, Rob discovers Shelby and
the woman under a tarp in the backseat, bound and gagged. The Jeep driver kills
the trucker when he goes out and then approaches the Jeep. Rob locks the door
and tries to drive away, only to discover that the keys are missing. The Jeep driver
then breaks open the window with his sledgehammer and kills Rob.
TABITHA – Elsewhere, Tabitha
Wright is spending the night in her aunt’s house to babysit her cousins, Max
and Danny. She finds out that their babysitter, June had already left, though
she was supposed to wait for Tabitha to arrive before leaving. Later that evening,
a man claiming to be June’s boyfriend, Owen, arrives looking for her since she
missed cheerleading practice. He leaves when Tabitha tells him she does not know
where June is. While exploring the house, Tabitha finds the guest bedroom
decorated with clown toys and becomes particularly scared of a life-sized clown
doll sitting on the rocking chair. She later talks with her aunt about the life-sized
doll but is told that the family has no such doll. Tabitha and the boys are
then attacked by the clown, who the boys insist is Owen. Tabitha helps the boys
escape before hiding in the shed. Inside, she opens the closet and finds June’s
corpse. The clown enters the room, his laughter similar to the Jeep driver’s.
LISA – Sometime earlier, Lisa Swan
and her boyfriend Dan begin searching for their roommate Cat, who had
disappeared during a party the night before. They go to an old hotel that Cat said
she would be at. Lisa tries to get in, but the caretaker, a man whose face is
covered by a face mask, refuses to let her in. She convinces Dan to pose as a
heath inspector and look inside. After letting him in, the caretaker shows Dan
a music player and encourages him to play it, claiming there is a surprise in
the end. Dan does so and at the end of the song, a knife flies out of the speaker,
stabbing him in the eye. Unable to get in contact with Dan, Lisa sneaks into
the house and meets an apparently deaf man, who leads her to a room filled with
beds that have dead bodies stuffed into the mattresses. Lisa finds Cat stuffed
alive in one mattress, but as she attempts to free Cat, the deaf man attacks
her, revealing himself to be the killer.
THE BRIAR HILLS CONNECTION – In a
police interrogation room, Tabitha is revealed to be alive and in shock. When
she does not answer the interrogator’s questions, he leaves her alone. Tabitha
then reminisces about her childhood, where she, Shelby and Lisa were once all
friends at Briar Hills Elementary School. After they were tasked to design miniature
sets inside shoeboxes that can be viewed through peepholes, a male classmate –
the unnamed boy from the prologue – demanded to see their work before showing
it to Tabitha; it was of a rat chained up and its skin pulled back to reveal its
organs. It becomes clear that the boy is insane. Tabitha is then interrogated
by a therapist who asks her about Shelby and Lisa. When Tabitha says that they
were all friends at Briar Hills Elementary, but have not seen each other for
years, the therapist remembers a patient she once had who was from Briar Hills.
Then, she comes to a realization and informs Tabitha that Lisa and Shelby are
also here, before leaving to find a phone that works. Tabitha wanders out after
her and discovers that she is not in a police station. She finds the therapist
dead and sees the police interrogator, who was the killer all along, approaching.
Tabitha flees to the basement, where she finds herself trapped between two
glass walls. Beyond either side, she finds Shelby and Lisa, bound and gagged
and their skin pulled back similar to the rat in the boy’s shoebox. The killer
initially taunts them, but then reveals that the two are unharmed and that
their opened skin is just a trick. Just as the man is about to kill Shelby,
Tabitha pretends to laugh, prompting him to open the glass wall and approach
her. Tabitha then stabs him in the beck with a scalpel she had grabbed and
unties her friends. As they try to escape, Lisa and Shelby are killed, while
Tabitha climbs a ladder that leads to a barn shed. She hides in a room with
props used to kidnap the three women. The killer surprises her as he looks
through a peephole and reveals that she is in the back of a truck, which is by
the same old house where Rob died. After he drives a short distance, the struck
stalls. Tabitha takes hold of a spiked weapon and when he returns to look
through the peephole again, stabs him through the face, killing him. Tabitha
restarts the truck and drives away, narrating about how she and her friends had
laughed at the killer when they were young, thinking that he was a joke. After
he was sent away, they had forgotten all about him, but he never forgot them.
She then remarks that even though it was all over, she still cannot get his
laugh out of her head.
AMY’S TORCH (2008) – Any keeps the monster under her bed away at night with her magic torch but one night the batteries run out. Amy is a little girl who struggles to sleep at night, because she knows there is a monster underneath her bed. Her mother shrugs it off as Amy’s imagination and the only defense little Amy has comes in the form of a flashlight. On one fateful night the batteries die and Amy is left screaming in the dark. Her mother decides to investigate and finds out Amy wasn’t just scared of her imagination. This short film directed by Gary Mellor and Ben Wilkinson plays out in true fairytale style. By using a narrator up until the point of climax they are able to enhance character building within a very short time and they focus on a plot that is very easy to relate to. It is obvious the budget was very limited, but the finished product doesn’t disappoint and the directors threw a nice little spin on an old story. In fact they proved that horror isn’t all about special effects. A good story, executed with skill, can also have great entertainment value.
ANAK (2008) – My blood anchor to
all these. It all begins with Nita starting with a new life in a new place.
With her is her cousin Kay. Nita is a pretty girl but she looks as if there is
nothing in this world were left for her. Kay a successful model, dubbed as the
most beautiful lady in Malaysia. She is at the peak of life and full of zest.
It is in her new home that Nita starts to see things or rather a person, a
young child around the age of 5.
ANGUS VALLEY FARMS 2 (2008) – A
group of teens travel to a crumbling ghost town in search of the killer who
murdered their friends, all the while remaining fatally unaware that they’re
walking into a diabolical trap. Some teenagers travel to a ghost town in search
of their friends’ killer, unaware that they are heading into a trap.
ANIMALS (2008) – Syd Jarrett is an
unsuspecting, down-and-out man in a washed -up hick town who gets pulled into sub-culture
of blood-hungry creatures. He encounters Vic, a renegade whose animal instincts
are stronger than his human ones. As things begin to get even worse Jarrett
realizes that his best chance for happiness and survival lies in his true love
for Jane. A small-town guy experiences a startling transformation after falling
for a seductive beauty with a bizarre secret. When Syd met Nora, it was lust at
first sight. After hooking up however, Syd find himself fighting to suppress his
animal instincts. When Nora’s ex-lover Vic shows up intent on winning her back,
the stage is set for a bloody confrontation. Based on the novel by John Skipp
and Craig Spector. An unsuspecting down-and-out man in a washed-up hick town
has his life turned upside down when a drop-dead gorgeous stranger walks through
the door at the local bar. In Reno, Vic and Nora form an unusual couple of
predators between human and animals that feed off human blood and enjoy having
sex. Nora decides to leave Vic and heads to Clayton Valley, where she meets the
former football player Jarrett in the bar Jules’ Joint. Jarret was in college
with a scholarship, but he had an accident that interrupted his promising
career and he had returned to his hometown. His best friend Jules idolizes him
and has many pictures and trophies of Jarrett exposed in his bar; the bartender
Jane has a secret crush on him. Presently Jarrett has a problem with his chief
Vaughn that persecutes him at work. Nora is harassed by Vaughn in the bar; but
she refuses his invitation and goes to Jarrett’s house; she bites him while
they have wild sex. Jarrett feels his senses more accurate but he does not
understand what is happening to him. When Vic arrives in town seeking out Nora,
Jarrett discovers that Vic is not human while Nora and his friends are jeopardized
by the cruel creature.
ANTI-PERVERT MANUAL (2008) – The day
will never be the same again… An officer worker obsessed with the supernatural
visits an old parking lot and finds evidence of ghosts of perverts. Young office
lady arrives in a remote parking lot and starts seeing weird, inexplicable sights
(a man whose shadow has a life of its own, a mysterious scythe-bearing figure
tolling a bell, a terrifying dream of her own burial). Things come to a head
when a pervert of the region starts creeping towards her car – or is it
something more sinister?
APOCALYPSE RISING (2008) – Sometimes
the road to redemption takes you through Hell. Six students on spring break
must stop a fallen angel from creating a race of Nephillium meant to defy God
and destroy the Earth.
APRIL FOOL’S DAY (1986) – When Muffy
St. John invited her college friends up to her parents’ secluded island home
for the time of their lives, she just forgot to tell them it might be the last
time of their lives. As soon as the kids arrive on the island, someone starts
trimming the guest list… one murder at a time. And what starts out as a weekend
of harmless “April Fool’s Day” pranks turns into a bloody battle for survival.
It’s just what you’d expect from the producer who brought you ‘Body Parts” “Species”
and “Friday the 13th Parts III—IV. When a group of college students
decides to spend spring break at the secluded island estate of their wealthy
classmate Muffy St. John what starts out as a fun, hedonistic weekend turns
into something more sinister. Muffy is very fond of practical jokes and sets up
numerous gags throughout her mansion. But when friends begin going missing and
turn up dead, they realize that they’re trapped in the isolated isle with a
mysterious and brutal killer.
A group of college friends: Harvey,
Nikki, Rob, Skip, Nan, Kit and Arch gather to celebrate Spring Break by
spending the weekend at the island mansion of their friend Muffy St. John, on
the weekend leading up to April Fools’ Day. The tone is set almost immediately with
Muffy preparing details around the house and finds an old Jack-in-the-box she remembers
(in flashback). Her friends, meanwhile, are joking around on the pier, then on
the ferry to the island. But en route to the island, Buck, a local deckhand is
seriously injured in a gruesome accident. Once on the island in the mansion, it
turns out Muffy has set up a variety of little jokes from the simple (Whoopie
Cushions, dribble glasses, etc.) to the more complex and disturbing (an audiotape
of a baby crying in someone’s room, heroin paraphernalia in a guest’s wardrobe,
etc.) Through it all, the friends in general try to relax. But then Skip goes missing,
Kit catches a glimpse of what looks like a dead body. Next, Arch and Nan also
go missing. During a search, Nikki falls into the island’s well and finds the
severed heads of Skip and Arch and the dead body of Nan. Afterward, the remaining
group discovers that the phones are dead and there is no way to get off the
island until Monday. One after another people vanishing or being killed and their
bodies being found. Kit and Rob put together some clues, realizing that everyone’s
earlier assumption is wrong. The kinsman of the deckhand injured when they
arrived is a red herring. Muffy, it turns out, has a violently insane twin sister,
Buffy, who has escaped. In fact, the Muffy they have been around since the
first night was Buffy pretending to be Muffy. They discover Muffy’s severed
head in the basement.
Buffy chases them with a breaking knife
and the couple are separated. Kit flees from Buffy into the living room – where
she finds everyone else there, alive and calmly waiting for her. It was all a
joke, or accurately, a dress rehearsal. It is revealed to the audience that the
whole movie was never a slasher film from the start, but rather pretending to
be one. Muffy hopes to turn the mansion into a resort offering a weekend of
staged horror. She even had a friend who does special effects and makeup for
Hollywood help. Each “victim” agreed to take part as things were explained to
them. Everyone has a huge laugh and breaks out lots of bottles of champagne. Later
that night, a half-drunk Muffy goes to her room. She finds a wrapped present on
her bed. Grinning, she unwraps it. It is the Jack-in-the-Box. Savoring the surprise,
she turns the handle slowly. When “Jack” finally pops out, Nan – the shy,
bookish girl who knew Muffy from acting class, emerges from behind her and
slits her throat with a razor. Muffy screams, but then realizes she is not
really bleeding. She “got” her with a trick razor and stage blood. The film
ends with the Jack-in-the-Box winking at the audience.
Nine college students staying at a
friend’s remote island mansion begin to fall victim to an unseen murderer over the
April Fool’s Day weekend. A group of nine college friends gather together at an
island mansion belonging to heiress Muffy St. John to celebrate their final
year of school. They soon discover that each has a hidden secret from their past
which is revealed and soon after, they turn up dead. Yet are they really dead? Or
is it just part of some very real and cruel April Fool’s jokes. The hostess Muffy
is the only one who apparently knows what’s going on. But then again, is it
really her doing the killing?
In the cellar of her house, Muffy
St. John picks up a Jack-in-the-Box and thinks back to her 10th birthday
where she received it as a birthday gift (a tiny alien which jumped out and
scared her, making the other party guests laugh). Meanwhile, a group of young
college students wait at a dock to be picked up by a ferry and transported to
Muffy’s island cottage for the weekend. They include Kit and her boyfriend Rob,
Nikki, and her boyfriend Chaz and Arch whom are best friends. The rest of the
group includes Nan, Hal ad Muffy’s cousin Skip. On the ferry, Skip and Arch play
a game of “stretch” (throwing a switchblade and both trying to stretch for it),
until an irritated Arch throws the blade and Skip and hits him in the stomach.
Skip falls off into the water in which the ferry crewman Buck and Rob jump in
only to see Skip with a trick knife-belt. Skip and Arch laugh at their April
Fool’s Day joke which happens to be that very day. Buck stays in the water and
tries to hook the ferry as it comes into the dock and the group argues. Buck is
hit by the ferry. He jumps out of the water with a chopped face. Buck is taken
away by the ferryman in a motorboat screaming “they did it!” A local policeman,
Constable Porter, is angry at the kids for letting this prank get out of
control and tells them to stay put on the island as he accompanies Buck to the
local hospital.
Muffy takes the group up to her house
where she shows them the living and dining room areas and shows them their quarters
to spend the night. That evening, the group sits around the dinner table as
Skip, still upset over what happened to Buck, stays outside and drinks. Muffy,
with a smirk on her face, invites everyone for dinner as Nan sits on a Whoopie
cushion and Arch leans back in a breakaway chair. They talk over what they will
do after graduation in which Muffy tells them about her inheriting her father’s
house and talks about turning it into a country inn. They drink to a toast as
Muffy’s smirk gives away another gag she sets up as everyone spills champagne
on themselves from the trick drippy glasses as Muffy laughs.
They retire to their rooms for the
night as they encounter more gags left behind by Muffy, which includes a trick
cigar that blows up when Hal lights it; spurting water faucets and trick lights
that don’t turn off. Hal finds snipped newspaper articles about people dying in
a fog and a fire, which he apparently was involved in some years back. Arch
finds a drug paraphernalia in his bathroom cabinet which he is disturbed by over
his past as a junkie. Nikki finds a studded collar with a chain in which her
reaction gives away her interest in S&M and bondage. Nan comes out of the shower
when she hears a baby cry and she finds a tape recorder playing in her drawer
which makes her upset. Outside, a drunken Skip enters the boathouse near the dock
where he is grabbed by someone. The next day, Kit and Rob find Muffy in the kitchen
cooking breakfast with her hair astray and acting strange. The group enjoys
hanging around the back yard, while Nan tries to chase down Muffy. Rob is still
upset about his own discovery and in his and Kit’s bedroom where his counselor informed
her that he was not serious enough to get into medical school. He and Kit go the
boathouse to kiss when Kit sees Skip float by and the two of them run to tell
the others. Chaz finds Skip’s broken and bloody trick switchblade, but no trace
of Skip’s body. Arch suggests that it is Buck who has returned to seek his
revenge for his being maimed the previous day.
Meanwhile, Nan catches up to Muffy
and angrily tells her about finding the cassette tape joke and Muffy claims not
to know what Nan is talking about. Nan tells Muffy that she had an abortion
some year back and kept it quiet between them. In the woods, as Arch is running
through the house, he gets caught in a trap when he is hung upside by a snare,
while a snake is on the ground trying to bite him. An unseen person appears,
kicks away the snake and stands over Arch who screams. On the same path a few
minutes later, no one can find Arch. Rob tries to call the police on the house
phone but is unable to get through. When the water faucets in the house turn
off, Hal and Nikki go to the nearby well. Hal accidentally drops the bucket into
the well and does not want to go down to retrieve it. Nikki climbs down into the
well when a rung breaks making her fall into the water. As Hal climbs down to
help her, Nikki finds the severed head of Arch, as well as Nan’s dead body in
the well.
That evening back at the house,
Constable Porter calls and says that he is at the hospital with Buck and tells them
that he is coming to the island with an important thing to tell them and he
will send a flare up at the dock when he arrives. Aware that there is a killer
out there, the group goes around locking all the doors and windows of the house.
In the study, Kit finds an old photograph of twins. Nikki says that Muffy has
been acting strange all day and looks different from a pasty white face to her
Catholic Girl School clothing as well as mentions the clodhopper “nurse shoes”
that she is also wearing. Hal mentions that he heard Muffy and Nan arguing
earlier about something in Nan’s room, referencing an abortion that Nan was rumored
to have gotten. They talk about the things found in their rooms when Muffy
enters and says that she is going to bed. Chaz and Mike go upstairs to their
room as Rob heads up to the attic to keep an eye out for the Constable. Kit
goes off with Rob, while Hal stays to watch the rooms downstairs.
As Nikki packs her bags to leave,
Chaz tries to calm her down by putting on a leather mask. Annoyed, Nikki pushes
him to the bed and leaves the room. Nikki returns to see Chaz lying still on
her bed. He does not respond to her and when she moves his hands away from his
crotch, she sees blood. She is approached by someone standing behind the door. In
the attic, Rob tells Kit that one is to be left alone with Muffy for he does
not trust her. They find a collection of dolls, apparently representing dead
people and a red flare goes off in the distance outside. They run out of the attic
and call to someone but cannot find the others. The two enter Nikki and Chaz’s
room only to find a bloody room, but no bodies. Kit runs into Muffy’s room and
finds Hal dead after being tied up and hung.
In a panic, Kit and Rob run outside
and to the dock where they pull in a motorboat, but no one is on board. They
find a letter on the boat addressed to Constable Porter which talks of “Miss St.
John”, a dangerous mental patient who escaped several days ago from a clinic.
Kit says it can’t be Muffy for she was with her at Vassar all that time. They
try to start up the boat, to leave, but the keys are gone having been taken by
Constable Porter who has gone off. Rob says that there is a spare set of keys to
the boat in the house and the two of them return to find the house totally dark
with all the doors and windows closed and the shades pulled down. They enter
through a cellar window where they see a bloody trail and find Muffy’s clothes from
the night before in the basement fireplace. Height measurements are found on
one of the basement walls for “Muffy” and “Buffy”. Kit recalling the photo of
the twins, says that it must be Muffy’s twin sister, Buffy who has been doing
all the killing.
Kit and Rob see eyes looking at
them from behind a painting and after putting it away, discover Muffy’s severed
head. They run up to the kitchen to find the keys for the boat when Muffy/Buffy
appears at the back door armed with a large butcher knife, trying to get inside.
Buffy forces the door open and pushes Rob into a closet and locks it and goes
after Kit, who runs into the dining room and tries to reason with the pasty-faced,
wild-eyed Buffy who does not respond and terrorizes her with the butcher knife.
Kit pushes Buffy back when she tries to stab her and runs into the adjacent living
room to find all of the dead people, alive and well, sitting around the room.
Buffy walks in and… pushes the fake blade of the butcher knife into her hand as
she and everyone else looks up at Kit and yell… APRIL FOOLS!!!!!
Buck appears in the closet with
Rob, pulls off his prosthetic injury and slaps it on Rob’s face and unlocks the
closet door for him. Rob runs out and into the living room where everyone
laughs some more. Kit and Rob are relieved, but not amused at this giant practical
joke on them. Muffy thanks all of them for participating and helping out. She
tells everyone about her idea about making the house into a country inn but
having a special type of “whodunit weekend” where guests are to figure out a
simulated mystery and she wanted a “rehearsal’. Once a person was “killed” they
were let in on the joke, with Rob and Kit being the last ones left and the
winners who figured it all out. Muffy explains that her twin sibling is actually
her cousin Skip. Constable Porter is actually her wealthy uncle, and Buck is a
makeup artist who constructed all the severed heads and fake bodies. Even the
ferryman was in on the whole thing as well. Muffy apologizes for some of the more
personal jokes and the group drinks from dozens of bottles of champagne that
Muffy brings out and they all have a happy good time.
Later that night, a very inebriated
Muffy returns to her bedroom for the night when she finds a package on her bed
and upon opening it up finds a Jack-in-the-Box. As Muffy warily begins turning
it to open, the Jack jumps out when sudden Nan jumps out behind the bed, grabs
Muffy by the hair, gorily slices her throat and Muffy screams. Nan smiles and
shows Muffy the fake knife with the fake blood spraying from it, as a final
back-at-you joke. “April Fools” says Nan to Muffy, as the Jack-in-the-Box winks
at the viewers.
April Fool’s Day just happens to
be the birthday of rich college student Buffy, so she invites a group of friends
from Vassar over to her family’s island getaway to spend the weekend partying.
Though some practical-joke-shenanigans on the ferry over from the mainland lead
to unexpected bloodshed and put a damper on the festivities, Buffy unleashes a
flood of more benign pranks on her guests, setting a tone of giddy abandon.
With plenty of randy guys and gals on hand and no parental supervision, it isn’t
long before drunken escapades ensue. As the weekend progresses, however, guests
begin to disappear mysteriously and before long Buffy and friends find
themselves huddling in terror in their remote getaway. The next ferry isn’t due
until Monday and the partygoers aren’t sure whether any of them will make it
that long. The mostly Canadian cast of April Fool’s Day includes Leah King
Pinsent, daughter of actor/director Gordon Pinsent and Amy Steel, a veteran of
the second and fourth Friday the 13th installments.
Review: Amid the glut of gory
horror films that clogged the cable schedules and cineplexes in the wake of
Halloween and Friday the 13th, April Fool’s Day stands out as a
fairly restrained exercise in the ‘80s teen-slasher genre. Low on gore and high
on suspense, it uses the boy-who-cried-wolf scenario inherent in its premise to
keep the audience guessing as to where the practical jokes end and the body
count begins. With her Sheryl Lee-like features and facial expressions, Deborah
Foreman makes an appealingly off-balance scream queen, while the rest of the young
cast puts a nicely personal stamp on what could have been a collection of
college-age stereotypes. It helps that Hollywood vet Danilo Bath (Beverly Hills
Cop) laces the script’s sexual hijinks with actual character developed and a
few decent plot twists. Some creepy music and a few freaky set pieces and a visceral
edge to a workmanlike film that spends more time playing mind games than it
does spilling blood. When all is said and done, though, April Fool’s Day has
more roller-coaster thrills than most slasher flicks with five times the gore. Review
by Brian J, Dillard
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