I must admit that I was dreading this remake of the 1986 film of the same name after watching some terrible clips and reading awful reviews for it, but to my surprise, whilst it wasn’t exactly brilliant, it wasn’t as bad as I had been expecting.
The film opens as rich bitch and prankster extraordinaire Desiree Cartier welcomes guests to a debutante ball she is throwing on behalf of her aspiring actress friend Torrance. Unknown to the rest of their social circle, Desiree and her brother Blaine are secretly planning to publicly ruin one of the guests, fellow socialite (not to mention main rival to Desiree) Milan Hastings by creating a sex scandal. Everything seems to be going to plan until Milan has a fit and falls off a balcony to her death. One year later, the friends receive invitations to a get together at Milan’s grave where it is revealed that unless the person who caused her death comes forward, each of the friends shall die.
April Fool’s Day is what one could only imagine a Halloween episode of Gossip Girl might look like. Glossy, chock full of fake scares and headed by a bunch of hot totty, it’s really trashy, classless, in poor taste, over the top, glam and glitzy but to my surprise, it was the first so bad it’s good film I’ve seen in ages. It deviates a lot from the original (so at least they set out to do something new) and is never scary (although I was surprised to see that there was quite a bit of blood) but is fun nonetheless.
I think most people probably hated this because the original was pretty creepy and had some neat FX work, where as this is laughable and full of dodgy make-up and blood splatter (which actually works in context when you think about it). This aside, it is worth noting that this film acts as a stark contrast to the directing duo’s previous effort, patchy video cam flick The Hamiltons, as technically, the film looks great and it’s high production values are a major strong point.
OVERALL SUMMARY
April Fool’s Day is just a silly bit of harmless fun and those who can appreciate that 15 year olds need horror movies too should enjoy it. If you liked films such as Gossip, The In Crowd and Cruel Intentions then this will most likely be for you. If you’re a hardcore horror fan who loves gore, terror and violence, you’ll most likely hate it. It’s less scary than the horror episodes of Dawson’s Creek but it is my opinion that po-faced critics have unfairly pissed all over this.
