- Written and directed by Menahem Golan
- Starring
- Catherine Mary Stewart
- George Gilmour
- Grace Kennedy
- Alan Love
- Vladek Sheybal
- Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus
Time for the B-Masters to find out what incredible SOBs (and just plain Bs) they are, when we give ourselves license to assign each other movies to review. Will we ever be able to trust each other again? Only time will tell.
Most of us, in inflicting this roundtable on one another, indulged in our cruelest instincts and assigned one of the worst movies in our collection to our hapless receiver. It stands to reason, I suppose; masochists are quite often sadists as well.
But not, I declare, the enigmatic Apostic, proprietor of B-Notes, and my assigned Secret Santa. The Big A has videos in his collection that are positively Lovecraftian in their ability to shatter the sanity of the most rational of mortals. He could have forced me to watch a movie which would have left me huddled naked in the corner, sitting in my own offal and blubbering something about a black goat in the woods.
Instead, this prince among men sent not one, but three videos, giving me the choice of my own poison. One was Martin, George Romero’s naturalistic vampire film; another was God Told Me To, Larry Cohen’s cult flick about cultism and UFO messiahs. Both of these had long been on my “Gotta See It Before My Sedentary Lifestyle Kills Me” list, so it was a kindness for Apostic to land them in my lap.
The third, though, was The Apple, which I carefully removed from the mailer with tongs from behind a shielded wall. You don’t hear about this movie much, but what I’d heard — largely that it was one of the most stunningly ill-conceived motion pictures of all time — scared me. Fortunately, Apostic had given me an easy out. I mean, didn’t I also have two tapes right there that I wanted to watch anyway? No sweat.
It took a couple of days, but guilt and shame did take hold of me. Here I am, a member of the prestigious and elitist B-Masters Cabal. We are the tempered, the tried-and-true, the living examples of Nietzsche’s dictum, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” We laugh in the face of Albert Pyun, of Greydon Clark, of Jess Franco. (Well, maybe we don’t laugh at Franco, but we don’t let him stare us down, either.) How could I seek easier waters when a challenge had been placed in my lap? Sure, it was a disco-era futuristic musical with really really overt religious allegorical overtones (how overt? Compared to this, you might not notice any religious presence in The Exorcist), but I could not let my strong B-Master brothers (and sister) down by bowing out when an easy escape presented itself.
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Sappy pop pap — of the FUTURE! |
Of course, all this high-falutin’ guano went through my head before I turned on The Apple and started crying for my mommy.
Now, remember going into this, this was written and directed by Menahem Golan, and produced by him and his long-time associate, Yoram Globus. You know, Golan-Globus, part of The Cannon Group, the now-defunct studio behind whole bunches of low-budget action films that graced the Saturday afternoons of many a local station. I mean, we’re talking about American Ninja and Invasion U.S.A. and Revenge of the Ninja and the Death Wish movies and America 3000 and Cobra and literally dozens of other movies familiar to anyone who’s ever strayed away from the New Release wall. Not great cinema — in fact, much of it stinks to high heaven — but it all met a demand. The public wants to see low-budget action flicks? Hey, we’ll give them low-budget action flicks! So it’s startling to see, back in the early days of their careers, how they teamed up to make a movie that met no demand, that nobody wanted to see.
In the far-flung [cough] future of 1994, much has changed since the world of 1980. But one thing has stayed constant: Disco. That’s right, of all the things that can fade with time, disco is apparently the one thing that Golan predicted to be here to stay. Which really appalls me — not because of a loathing of disco (which I have, but that’s not the problem here), but simply because it’s pretty easy to see that anything big, loud, and flashy that arrives on the scene and takes everybody by storm is pretty much destined to burn out relatively quickly. Furbies? Check. Magic-EyeTM pictures? Check. Newt Gingrich? Thank God. So why anyone would want to posit that disco would become the reigning paradigm for music is beyond me.
Except, of course, that I’m taking it all too literally. This is an allegory, remember? So why are we even setting this in the future, since nothing really stands to gain from such a setting, plotwise? Oh, yeah — it must be so they could show off the godawful handiwork of the costume designers. If John Travolta had been able to make Battlefield: Earth when he was popular the first time around, he would have dressed exactly like the members of the band we meet in our first scene, a music competition: Bim. That’s the name of the band. Bim. Their floor show is excruciating on the eyes (if only persistently irritating on the ears), and naturally they take their audience of space-age teens and twentysomethings by storm, much to the delight of their diabolical-looking agent/producer, Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal) and his space-age disco goon hangers-on.
The next number on stage, though, is the complete antithesis to Bim. Not that they’re good; no, they’re not that antithetical. It’s a charming duo of Alphie and Bibi (George Gilmour and Catherine Mary Stewart, who amazingly managed to have a career after this point), singing their song about love beinfg the universal harmony and such. Blech. Tired, tired, tired lyrics; it’s almost enough to make you want to bring Bim back on. Almost. (By the way, much is made of the fact that the duo is from the “sticks,” the “boonies,” etc. In fact, their hometown is mentioned by name quite often: Moosejaw, Saskatchewan. I’m guessing that Moosejaw is the only place where The Apple played well during its theatrical run.)
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Oom-pah, loom-pah, doompitee-doo… |
The crowd, however, loves it, to the chagrin of Boogalow, who instructs a flunky to sabotage their performance by playing a special red cassette which, I guess, ultrasonically pisses the audience off. But Boogalow sees potential in the young duo, as he strokes his goatee devilishly…
So Alphie and Bibi end up at Boogalow’s party that night, where all the tie-in merchandise for Bim is also introduced, everything based on a triangle (ooh, that’s so complex and original): Bim glasses, a Bim-ball game (groan), and ultimately, Bim marks — triangular stickers that you wear somewhere on your face. Then Boogalow does what any savvy agent does: Draws the man aside to talk about signing them, while Bim’s lead male singer Dandy (Alan Love) draws Bibi away to get her stoned and seduce her.
And sing to her. And have her sing back. And it’s right about here that the true horror of my chosen ordeal dawned on me: This wasn’t just a bad movie about bad music — it was a bad musical. Now, I’ve got nothing against musicals; hell, I’ve often wished that life were like a musical, and an invisible orchestra would strike up whenever I felt like breaking into song. A good musical is a truly powerful beast, able to capture a viewer emotionally in a way that straight cinema (or, usually, straight music) cannot. But there are few things on or beneath the earth which are viler than a bad musical. Hell is entertained exclusively by bad musicals. And this one is showing on the infernal IMAX, 24-7.
Alphie manages to drag Bibi away after roughly three and a half minutes of this, and does what anyone would do in his situation: Comes back the next morning to Boogalow’s office to review contracts. And that previously dawning ordeal burst full blown over the horizon as a hideous musical number comes into being in Boogalow’s waiting room: This bad musical is going to constantly assail us with the bad music. Whenever possible. For no reason. Even though I’ve never done a bad thing to Menahem Golan.
Three and a half minutes of bad fever dream later, Alphie and Bibi are shown contracts. Alphie is suspicious and wants to review the papers, but Bibi is already half-sucked into the life of stardom, so she jumps right in and signs. And then…
[Almost, my conscious mind shies away from describing this next part. Almost, I could believe it was a hallucination. A fantasy that bubbled to my conscious mind from nether regions of my psyche that I'd be happier not knowing existed. But I have the tape. I know it's on there. Please don't make me watch it again to prove it.]
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I’ve seen the future, baby, it is murder (on the eyes). |
… Then Alphie has a vision of a netherworld with Boogalow and his menagerie of yesmen capering around, offering Bibi a big apple. Oh, and Boogalow has golden horns. And, naturally, it’s a musical number, with Dandy enticing [cough] Bibi to take a bite.
See? Do you get it? Because signing with one of these big producers is, like, almost an Adam-and-Eve thing. Get it? Do ya? Because if you sign the contract, you’ll be biting the apple, and surrendering your innocence to their big old nasty lies, and things’ll never be the same again, and you’ll be cast out of Paradise!! Do you get it? Do you? DO YOU?!? HUH?!? HUH?!? DO YOU GET WHAT’S GOING ON HERE???? (Imagine the movie shaking you violently by the shoulders, and you’ll understand the level of subtlety and persuasion being dealt out here.)
Once out of this revelatory trance, Alphie storms out, refusing to sign, while Bibi is begun on her standard fame-and-fortune lifestyle, becoming a companion act to Bim. (Bibi and Bim. Weren’t those the two Martian puppets on Sesame Street who tried to identify things with their “Earth book”?) And then they go to another musical number, so let’s just skip over.
Whoops — Bibi then starts her North American tour, which means another musical number. Moving right along…
Dammit. Another musical number from Bim. I swear, it takes an awful lot of shitty music to make me actually want to get back to the story, but I’m just about there.
Okay. It’s an indeterminate amount of time later, when Bibi is a megastar and Alphie is living in a hole-in-the-wall apartment with a crusty über-Jewish woman for a landlord. He’s still writing songs, but doing it his way — in this case, a song about a woman who was taken from him by lies of fame and fortune. (Get it? Get it?!?) He goes for an audition (why yes, this is a musical number), but he’s “just not what they’re looking for” right now. Oh, and by the way, it is now compulsory for every citizen to wear a Bim mark at all times, as enforced by the Judge Dredd-esque police force. And there’s also a national Bim hour at four o’clock, when everybody, I mean everybody (policemen, firefighters, surgeons) has to stop what they’re doing and do the prescribed Bim dance. (I’m wondering if there’s ever been a lamer reason for introducing a musical number than those used in this movie.)
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Boogelow: 40% diabolical, 60% just plain silly. |
Then Alphie catches sight of Bibi and Bim (the other main member of Bim, by the way, is a black woman named Pandy (Grace Kennedy) — just thought you’d like to know) being mobbed by her fans. She hears him call her name over the crowd (largely because he isn’t calling the same cadence with the fans’ “Bi-bi! Bi-bi!”), and tries to get to him, but her bodyguards hustle her off and then beat the crap out of him. And then…
Hey, you knew in a movie chock-full of half-assed pop numbers, there had to be at least one duet where the hero and heroine sing together, even though geographically separated, right? Well, here it is, with Bibi singing about how empty her life is, and how she wants to go back to Alphie, and Alphie singing about how he’d welcome her back and never even tell her how right he’d been all along. Naturally, both of them sing their parts while looking out through rainy windows.
At the advice of his landlady-cum-Jewish-grandmother, then, Alphie goes looking for Bibi at Boogalow’s upscale party pad. Considering what policy-making musicians they are, it’s pretty easy for him to stroll into the digs, but then Pandy (the black female half of Bim, you recall) slips him a drugged drink and drags him through the place, then strips him and has sex with him while — wait, you saw this coming? — singing to him. (What you probably didn’t see coming is that this is done against a backdrop of a half-dozen beds on which almost-naked couples are performing poorly-choreographed mattress-dances interpreting the act of copulation.) Then he, still in his drug-induced haze, stumbles into Bibi, in a drug-induced haze of her own, and when she doesn’t recognize him, he leaves on tottering legs.
He’s awakened in the park by an old vagrant man who acts like an enlightened street corner prophet and led to a clearing in the park where a couple hundred refugees from the Sixties — “‘Hippies’,” he informs helpfully — are hanging out, just, you know, being. They’ve rejected all that The Man has brought into society, like television and Bim marks and bathing. Alphie says, “Gee, where can I sign up?” and runs back to his apartment to get his things.
And when Bibi wakes up in the morning, Pandy immediately tells her about Alphie having been there, and that she ought to go to him. Why? Beats the everloving hell out of me. But she leaves, and then Pandy, of course, breaks into song while Bibi goes back to Alphie’s apartment and then tracks him to the cave under the overpass where all the hippies live. She finds Alphie, and wordlessly he peels the Bim mark from her forehead.
You’d like to think it’s over, wouldn’t you? But no — we’re back with the hippies in the park. You’d think it’s immediately following, but it turns to now be a year later (Alphie has a beard, and he and Bibi have a baby). Then the riot police show up, under the command of Mr. Boogalow himself, who demands that they turn Bibi over to him or he’ll have them all arrested. Alphie calms Bibi by enigmatically saying that “Mr. Topps” will take care of it. And then, just when the jack-booted thugs are starting to round the Gentle Folk up…
You’ve probably run into the phrase deus ex machina before. It’s a contemporary criticism of lesser Classical Greek drama, in which the dramatist would have gotten his protagonist’s ass in a crack and have no idea how to save him in the end; the easy solution was to have one of the gods appear (descending or otherwise conveyed on a mechanical platform — thus, literally, “god from the machine”) and tidy everything up.
Well, the Classical origin of the concept may lend it a thin patina of legitimacy, but it still pisses me off that, at this point in the movie, the clouds open and a golden limousine drives across the sky in a bad optical effect, and a white-haired man in a white tuxedo steps out and comes to earth. Yes, this is the afore-mentioned Mr. Topps — and it is, quite literally, “God from the machine.” (Topps, by the way, is played by Joss Ackland, who also plays the homeless prophet.) And Mr. Topps stops the cops, then invites his followers, i.e., the hippies, to walk off into the clouds with him. (Pandy comes along, too — though why she came on a vagrant-rousting police action is a little unclear.) He tells Boogalow that he’s going to take them maybe to another planet, one where there is no Boogalow this time. The end.
And there I sit with conflicting emotions — on the one hand, relieved like rarely before that the blessed credits are finally rolling, and on the other hand, pissed out of my gourd that this movie ever got made.
I mean, how could you possibly convince anyone to fund it? How did Golan even convince Globus? I don’t care how close their working relationship was; hell, I don’t even care if they were committed gay lovers. There’s got to be a time to say, “Hey, you’re my moon and stars, but your ‘great’ movie idea sucks cat turds.”
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Baby strollers — of the FUTURE! |
For one thing, who’s the target audience? When you get right down to it, it’s an anti-disco movie; I mean, disco is the tool of the devil, whereas schmaltzy love songs and “Kum Bah Yah” are righteous. But to get that message, you’d have to sit through ninety minutes of disco music that rarely sinks below the discomfort level of the sty that’s growing on my right eyelid. In other words, the only people this movie would appeal to are the disco-freaks. If my thesis were “Child pornography is bad,” I probably wouldn’t fill 90% of my dissertation with pictures of naked eleven-year-olds. Kinda counterproductive.
And even then, the disco-freaks didn’t like it, because the music was bad — not disco-bad, but bad even for disco. So was the acting. So was the dialogue. So was the choreography. So was the set and prop design (how do you make a station wagon futuristic? put five-foot fins and pink hemispheres all over it!). So was the costume design.
I can only wonder if the ensuing Golan/Globus action flick empire wasn’t a kind of resigned surrender that worked out for the best. “The American audience doesn’t like our artistic vision? Fine — we’ll just feed’em macho crap!” Well, say what you will about all the afore-mentioned fists ‘n’ Uzis movies, but they do have one sterling quality: If you don’t like them, you can easily forget them. Whereas I’m going to have a hell of a time scrubbing The Apple out of my cortical tissue.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 1
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 0
- dream sequences: see, to determine that, you have to have some kind of baseline reality to compare to…
- ominous thunderstorms: 1
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
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