The Apple… TAKE A BITE!
Breaking news! I realize this is very last minute and only applies to our brethren in Northern California, but tonight Jesse Hawthorne Ficks is hosting a “Disco Extravaganza” at the gorgeous Castro Theater in SF. They’ll be showing prints of The Wiz, Staying Alive, and best of all, everyone’s favorite futuristic spiritual disco rock opera cult classic, The Apple.
Wait, what’s that you say? You’ve never seen The Apple before?
Mister Boogalow disapproves.
The Apple is a steaming Midas turd of a film baked in massive amounts of tin foil. It’s a glitter-encrusted, mylar-ensconced acid trip. It’s Jem and the Holograms’ flea market jamboree. It’s… it’s…. oh I have no idea what on earth these people were thinking, but the result is utter crackpot genius.
From my friend Douglas Wolk‘s blog review:
The Apple goes beyond so-bad-it’s-good to so-bad-it’s-a-luminous-masterpiece. It’s a disco-musical variation on the basic theme of Rocky Horror, if you can imagine Rocky Horror starring Fischerspooner and their entourage, as art-directed by Matthew Barney, recast as an allegorical representation of Messaianic Judaism, which seems to have been inspired by exploitation-flick producer Golan (as in Golan & Globus) getting a crate of several thousand triangular holographic glitter stickers that said “BIM” on them and figuring out how to make a movie that would let him use them all. There are… remarkable… production numbers. There are costumes from which my eyes are still recovering. Wow.
I repeat for emphasis. SEE THIS MOVIE. You will not regret it. That is, unless you have no sense of humor whatsoever. In which case, feel free to sit quietly in your beige living room under that precious Anne Geddes ladybug print, drinking rosehip tea with your pinkie extended as you watch Sarah, Plain and Tall for the fifteenth time.
Blessed be Castro Theater for bringing this rhinestone-studded Chick tract from planet Zardoz to a theater near me. And of course, it bears mentioning that the other two flicks are spectacularly gauche as well…
Wheeee!
November 17th, 2007 at 2:12 am
Thanks for the [several] laughs. I’ll look for this.
November 17th, 2007 at 2:40 am
There actually needs to be an official Coilhouse screening of this. You realize this would be the right and proper thing to do and the world would be better off for it.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:03 am
Bwah! The Apple is great! I so wish I were in Northern California right now.
November 17th, 2007 at 6:00 am
I saw “The Apple” once( just once), many years ago on cable, and was left absolutely numb by the end of it.
My first thought was that it looked horrendously dated, though I wasn’t certain what year it was made. Quite loosely, here is what I remember:
People were astride these colorful glittery motorcycles that looked like they were appropriated from Asbury Park kiddie-rides….it was supposed to be the future, after all.
****SPOILER ALERT!!****
There was a Dante’s Inferno-esque “Hell” sequence with a demonic character belting out a song that extolled the dubious virtues of the Apple in question, accompanied by various deformed, hybrid individuals cavorting about.
Legions of Hippies mysteriously appear in the final sequence, the last remaining representatives of the noble, enlightened side of the human race, who, along with the protagonists, ascend into….well, it was either a U.F.O. or a literal Stairway to Heaven…my powers of memory fail me here.
But yes, MR. BOOGALOW is the memory that has, for whatever reason, indelibly burned itself into my brain.
As with certain film characters like Princess Dragon Mom from “Infra Man” or Stephen Furst’s potrayal of the rampaging basement ‘tard from “The Unseen”, I will carry the memory of Boogalow to my grave.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Paul knows the secret handshake.
I really, really think Stephen Furst deserved an Oscar nomination for being able to emote so much merely by grunting menacingly while clad in filthy diaper rags.
Princess Dragon Mom has a posse. And I’m in it. (Who hasn’t dreamed of turning into a flying lizard when they get pissed off?!)
I’m not surprised Mr Boogalow is what stuck with you, seeing as Vladek Sheybal remains a stalwart bad ass even when his beard is full of glitter and they’re making him swing a teeeeny tiny noose in front of the camera during song-and-dance numbers at the Berlin International Airport. Dude got captured by Nazis and interned in a concentration camp…twice. Immediately escaped both time. HARD CORE.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Mil, let’s do it. Maybe if we beg and plead enough, we could get Hollywood Forever to do a screening? Or perhaps a double-billing with The Room somewhere??
November 18th, 2007 at 3:18 am
I am seconding Mil And Mer. Coilhouse screening, soon. Booze will flow, as will our joyful and confused tears by the end of it all. Or so I suspect.
November 18th, 2007 at 5:24 am
I must see this.
MUST.
MUST I SAY!!!!!!!!!
Hate The Wiz though…at least with the sound on I do. Off it’s actually quite fun.
November 20th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
I have always adored this film.
Whenever I watch it, it is sucks people in. There is a power to this crappy musical. I have had the song stuck in my head since you posted this.
Thanks!