“Nice? It's gotta be better than nice. It's gotta be bloody unforgettable.”
-Muffy (Deborah Foreman)

Whilst at first this may seem like you’re average 1980’s slasher; those defined by a lack of care for the writing, focus on the gaudily gory executions, and, of course, the terrible hair of the generation. What, in fact, April Fool’s Day is is one of the most underrated and overlooked ‘slashers’ of the generation, largely because it is just so misunderstood. I use the term slasher in inverted commas because although it was marketed as such prior to release, this is in fact an intelligent satire of that sub-genre.

Although one would make the immediate assumption that the cast assembled herein are also the…

One of my favorite films, and one of the most misunderstood and underrated horror films out there, probably due to being marketed as just another holiday themed slice-n-dice, when it's actually more like Agatha Christie's TEN LITTLE INDIANS rewritten as a slasher film by David Mamet. It's a genre critique/parody inside a hall of mirrors.

A group of mostly priveleged college kids are invited by their eccentric, rich friend Muffy (the excellent Deborah Foreman) to spend April Fools' Day weekend at her family's secluded island estate. For the holiday, Muffy (played by Foreman as a loveable yet slightly sinister and possibly crazy trickster) has booby trapped the entire mansion with things like trick doorknobs, dribble glasses and various creepy props…

I feel like I'm obsessing about this movie. Everyone will probably not get the same pleasure out of it as I did, but everytime I watch it I just have a huge smile on my face. I think it's got a lot to do with when I actually first saw it. I was in a deep rotten hole of BAD horror movies, especially 80s horror, but then I discovered this.

The characters are, mostly, just more "real" (they act like, you know, human beings) than they usually are in horror (or movies, period), especially the women. This is not rare in slasher/horror, there is almost always at least one somewhat relatable lead, but here there are FOUR distinguished girls with…

What is it about the 1980s? What was it that made the slasher movie so popular and so profitable? What about the films? What makes so many of them so enjoyable? I don't necessarily know the answers, but what I do know is that I am forever under the spell of many of these films.
Maybe it's about when you started coming of age. During the later half of the 80s, I was on the cusp of my teenage years and these are the types of films I wanted to see. So perhaps it's nostalgia. Any way you cut it, the horror films in the 80s and slasher films in particular seem like a logical development of the genre. They…

While this was marketed as a slasher movie back in its day, it very much is not that in any shape or form. And that will make the whole enterprise either very refreshing or cheerfully insufferable depending on your mood.

But there's something going on here, I'll give it that. By using the "Ten Little Indians" framework and youthful characters, the movie pulls off a clever bait and switch. This is really a satire about hedonism; and I wonder if people realized the movie was laughing at rather than with its intended audience. Given the lack of any of the real blood and guts that people come to these movies for, chances are most people were bored.

Also... The movie…