Why, Menahem, why?

When I was a kid, back in the days when 36 channels was a lot to have on your cable box, I used to watch a lot of terrible movies. (Before you say it, I know, how is that any different from now?) Well, the difference is that a lot of times, I'd see a movie, and then it would never be seen again, and my 10-year-old mind would have to wonder if I'd actually seen what I thought I saw. Anybody ever heard of The Water Babies? Or The Last Chase? How about Super Fuzz No? Didn't think so.

Back in the early 80's, we had Showtime, The Movie Channel, and HBO. Only one of each, mind you. None of this premium channel, targeted programming, multi-channel stuff. HBO and Showtime were fairly boring. No R-rated programming before 8 P.M., mostly kid's material during the day. (Though HBO did have Fraggle Rock.) But the Movie Channel, on the other hand, hoo boy. I saw the original Friday The 13th at 11 in the morning one day. I remember sitting with my father and watching the last twenty minutes of Animal House followed by The Enforcer on a Saturday morning. And we won't even get into the sex comedies. Let's just say that Porky's was an important part of my puberty.

But, oh, the lost, obscure, and unusual stuff that they used to run when they had to fill a programming schedule. I attribute my jones for odd, unusual, and terrible films to those years when I did nothing but watch the Movie Channel all day long in the summertime. One of the many films that I saw when I was a kid and which made an indelible impression on my fragile little (warped) mind has just been released on DVD.

The Apple(1980) is a very strange thing. It's a futuristic rock/disco musical that also doubles as a bizarre biblical allegory of sorts. And it's directed by Menahem Golan, one half of the team that produced some of the greatest cheesy action movies of the 80's, Golan/Globus. Together, under the Cannon Films aegis, they made a superstar out of Chuck Norris, and gave us such films as American Ninja, Cyborg, and The Delta Force.

But before all that, Menahem Golan directed possibly the worst disco/rock musical ever made. And that's saying something, when you consider Can't Stop The Music, Sgt. Pepper, and Xanadu. I was going to try do a play by play, but there's no way that I could possibly convey in words how terrible, and thus, how wonderful this movie truly is. But I'll try to give it a basic plot summary.

It is the far off future of 1994. The entire entertainment business is controlled by one Mr. Boogalow(Vladek Sheybal), an impresario who rigs the yearly WorldVision Song contest to make sure his latest finds, Pandy and Dandy, win with their disco-rock hybrid. But Boogalow doesn't expect two kids from Moosejaw(a big joke throughout the movie, BTW), Alphie and Bibi, to connect with the crowd with their sappy acoustic folk ballad. Boogalow tries to recruit them to his record label, but Alphie is good and moral, and resists. Bibi on the other hand, is more then happy to sign for fame and fortune. As she gets famous, Alphie struggles and fails to get her back, finally falling in with some hippies(led by Joss Ackland from Lethal Weapon 2~!) who have left the technological world behind. Bibi gets fed up with fame and goes to find Alphie. After a year, Boogalow and his troops track down Alphie and Bibi, who have been living the happy hippie life, to get Bibi back. But Boogalow(obviously the Devil), doesn't count on the fact that the hippie leader is really God(or Mr. Topps, as he calls himself), and Mr. Topps leads his followers off into the heavens by way of a bad process shot. As they leave, Topps tells Boogalow that he's going to find a new planet, "one without you".

Now, that doesn't nearly begin to capture how jaw-droppingly awful, and yet wonderful, this movie truly is. The musical numbers(co-written by future movie composer George S. Clinton(no, not the P-Funk guy)) range from bad to worse, the standouts being "The Apple", a song about temptation used to illustrate Alphie's hallucination about how bad Boogalow is, and "Speed", Bibi's first "hit", which is an ode to, well, taking speed. All the musical numbers are accompanied by lots of frenzied, choreographed (by an executive director of American Idol!) dancing, and there's a lot of, well, very gay material here. Boogalow's main assistant, Shake, is a heavily made up, effeminate black man, and there are lots, and I mean, LOTS, of crossdressers and glammy types in this movie.

I can say nothing other then you must see this movie, if only for the fact that it's so amazingly bad that it's wonderful. I never expected to see it on DVD, and I'm sure the participants probably wish it hadn't either. But in 2003, a new cult began to grow up around The Apple. It became a midnight movie sensation on the West Coast, which apparently caused MGM(which owns the Cannon library) to release the DVD.

The transfer is very good, if a little dark, and the audio track is very crisp. No extras have been included other then the theatrical trailer, which does the best it can selling the movie. I, for one, would have been amused to hear a commentary track with Golan defending the film.

If you have the opportunity, check this out. I can't recommend it highly enough.