THE APPLE (1980)
Article 4418 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 1-10-2014
Directed by Menahem Golan
Featuring Catherine Mary Stuart, George Gilmour, Grace Kennedy
Country: USA / West Germany
What it is: Bizarre rock musical

In 1994, a naive musical duo falls into the hands of a demonic agent and his corrupting power, and the two are separated from each other.

Over the years I’d heard about how bad this one was supposed to be, so I kept my expectations quite low going into it. Amazingly enough, I found myself rather enjoying it; sure, it was overdone and campy, but I found it entertainingly so, and I actually found the music to be fairly decent. I did, however, notice that the music wasn’t as nearly as futuristic as it was making itself out to be; basically, it’s just glam rock with some Las Vegas-style glitz added, a type of music that was already a bit dated by the time that this was made. It wasn’t until about halfway through the movie that I was startled by a revelation that coincided with my discovery that the future in which this was taking place was a dystopia in which the demonic agent seemed to be the primary political power; I suddenly realized that the movie was actually taking itself seriously. Once this happened, I began to see how obvious and how stupid the whole thing was. For one thing, if you’re going to make a movie about good vs evil, you’re probably not doing a wise thing by making your hero a tiresome bore. You also shouldn’t be having the forces of evil having ALL of the fun. The funny thing is that the movie seems blissfully unaware of its split personality and blind to its own hypocrisy. Maybe that’s why it never quite became the “ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW” of its day, which in some ways it resembles.