In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. We begin, as you might expect, with “A”: for the Genesis-inspired, amphetamine-fuelled fiasco The Apple.
Bad movies have power. They can be beautiful, or eye-openingly ugly. Bad movies can be prophetic visions, born in a time that wasn’t ready to appreciate them. Bad movies let us see otherwise respected stars and directors as vulnerable, fallible. Human. They unintentionally reveal the back-breaking, exhaustive labour of filmmaking: even a movie that totally sucks involves an army of collaborators, hours of creative passion. Sometimes enough money to literally end homelessness in a city or two. They make successful, beloved films feel miraculous, but can contain messy little miracles within themselves, too.
Bad movies can, in short, be so good. For the next 26 months, I’m going to be highlighting the inner beauty of some of my favourite bits of cinematic trash, choosing just one flop for each letter of the alphabet. As any Baby’s First Alphabet book will tell you, “A” is for “Apple”, and so I get the pleasure of transporting us both back to 1980. Or rather, to 1994…
The Apple is indeed set in the then-futuristic dystopia of 1994, a big risk for a film made just a decade or so before…in pre-unification West Berlin. It’s a chintzy, coke-fuelled retelling of the Book of Genesis, about love and shitty folk music triumphing over the forces of evil and awesome disco music. All this begins to make sense when you realise this is a Cannon production: made by Israeli super-producers, cousins, and madmen Yoram Globus and The Apple’s director Menahem Golan.
These are the guys blamed for ruining the Superman and Masters of the Universe franchises: and they’re responsible for the seminal title Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. Can you imagine a world in which none of us are walking around with the words ‘electric boogaloo’ on our tongues? As the producer-driven 1980s charged onwards, Golan and Globus’s Canon Group was responsible for everything from schlocky Stallone vehicles to actual solid thrillers like Runaway Train. Only one of those films nearly drove Golan to suicide, and we need to talk about it.
The songs in The Apple either surprisingly slap or make you want to end your life, and the film opens with one kind of each performance. First there’s Boogalow International Music spokespeople Dandi (Allan Love) and Pandi (Grace Kennedy), wailing out the anthemic, oft-repeated announcement that “hey hey hey/BIM’s on the way!” It’s like some demented corporate exercise at an Amazon or Disney shareholders conference. It completely rocks.
Then our Adam and Eve, Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), are winning over the Worldvision Song Contest’s crowd with their gloopy love ballad, and devilish exec Mr. Boogalow does not like it. They’re capturing over “138 heartbeats!”, as underling Shake (Ray Shell), a toady intended to represent the Garden of Eden’s snake, informs his boss.
The goateed villain swoops in to manipulate the couple with promises of fame: Alphie wants to keep being an acoustic little softboi, but Bibi, being a woman and so naturally morally weaker, is all too keen to sign away her soul. This leads to the undeniable high point of the film—an infernal fever dream of a dance sequence, with a pretty naked Dandi trying sooo hard to be Roger Daltrey as he urges Bibi to eat the Faustian apple, sealing her fate.
It’s a grand, frantic, hypnotising ensemble number: “it’s a natural, natural, natural, natural desire”, Dandi purrs nonsensically, “to meet an actual, actual, actual vampire.” I must cut the musical team of Israeli rockstar Coby Recht and George Clinton (not that George Clinton) some slack, though. Their original lyrics were being translated from Hebrew into English practically in real time, rewritten nightly in time for each chaotic day of shooting.
This movie invigorates me. I know all the lyrics to that title song, and Bibi’s sick AF junkie anthem ‘Speed’ (“America the land of the free/is shooting up with pure energy/and everyday she has to take more/speeeEEEEEDDD”). But what truly seduces me into biting The Apple, time and time again, is the profound emptiness of the film’s imagined environment. One filming location was used as a factory to produce poisonous gas during World War II. When the sequinned ensemble sings that “life is nothing but show-business/in 1994”, you can hear their voices echoing flatly in the high ceilings of a vast, abandoned office building.
With its Old Testament themes and bleak, devastated geographical feel, the shadow of war hangs high over The Apple, above the disco balls and covetable costumes. Fascism is an explicit theme, with Jewish-coded landlady Miriam Margolyes ticketed by a cop for not wearing a triangular “BIM mark” emblazoned on her face, and Orwellian loudspeakers announcing daily, government-enforced “BIM exercises”.
The film’s choreographer and, ominously enough, future American Idol judge Nigel Lythgoe recalled to Yahoo that much of the cast’s biblically-oversized performances were chemically inspired. “Because you could buy regular drugs over the counter in Berlin, the dancers were finding all different things”, he revealed. “Speed and Benzedrine and poppers and everything else. You could just buy it over the counter.”
Pandi’s very subtle seduction ballad ‘Coming For You’ is the movie’s last good song, building to a coda of orgasmic disco vocals. After that, it’s all wanky hippie ballads and bullshit. Alphie and Bibi reunite in the happy-clappy commune of a cave-dwelling cult leader (Joss Ackland), and when we cut to a year later, they have a lil baby in their arms and butterflies painted on their faces. Just when it seems Mr Boogalow has come to claim his rebellious star, a heavenly town car descends from the clouds and the godlike Mr Topps (also Ackland) comes out to ferry the wholesome folk to a better plane of existence. It’s deus ex Rolls Royce.
And yet things could’ve been even nuttier, if Golan’s original 1 million feet of film got chopped up as he planned. The excised opening scene cost a million dollars in itself, and featured “like 15 dinosaurs on set” in its invocation of Mr Topps’ creation of the earth. Audiences at the film’s 1980 Montreal Film Festival premiere hated the film as is, hurling their free gifts of the film’s vinyl soundtrack angrily at the screen. Lead actress Stewart claims that the reception left Golan heartbroken: the director threatened to throw himself off his hotel balcony.
The Apple has been concisely described as one of the “career-killing 70s/80s movie musicals” made in the wake of hits like Saturday Night Fever and Grease: “…like the Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music, the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu”. But were there big careers here to be killed? Or just a messy, doomsday-foretelling spectacle to be born?
To me and other bad movie lovers with a BIM sticker embellished upon our hearts, it’s perhaps more kindly seen as the ugly stepsister of Cabaret: an inferior, and accidental, peepshow of totalitarian kitsch, darkly combining showtune glamour and societal decay. A gloriously bad movie like this, taken everyday, can keep the doctor away. Stay tuned for 25 more of ’em, from B-movies to straight-up Z movies.
