The Apple (Musical)
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: D Film: C-
If there is a reason Hollywood despised the Cannon Films
team of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, The Apple (1980) could be the
beginning of why. Here was yet another
Rock Opera-type Musical that tried to create a world of the near future, which
was hell. Too bad the film itself was
closer than it thought.
Two not-so-good films had already done a poor job of
making this hell in conjunction with the major record labels before the real
thing got into the deep trouble they are now:
Brian De Palma’s The Phantom Of The Paradise (1974) and the Bee
Gees/Peter Frampton team-up in Michael Schultz’s horrific 1978 disembowelment
of The Beatles’ landmark Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (now in a
DTS DVD!?!) The “Go-Go Boys” did not
stop there, thought, wishing this was Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975), but
taking more inspiration from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the wrong
side of other serious Science-Fiction tales of futures gone wrong, and even
Glam Rock.
Part of that came from Funk icon George Clinton, who
participated in this, but most of the work does not feel like it. Like Nancy Walker’s Can’t Stop The Music
(a better film), the Penthouse Magazine Caligula and the remake of Blue
Lagoon, all of which came out the same year as this film, it was the peak
of excess from the XXX film era (about to die) and Disco music genre (about to
transmute at the time). Golan actually
directed this mess, and the reason it is forgotten is that everything and
everyone involved are unmemorable.
Each song tries to be a different hip genre of the time,
with a pseudo-sex number trying to be a knock-off of the Giorgio
Moroder-produced Donna Summer breakthrough hit Love To Love You Baby. Some parts of the film are explicitly Gay
bating, while others unintentionally so, as campiness abounds. Too bad it is not funny, just stupid. The pother name person wasted is the
quasi-Gay head record executive/police state head Boogalow, played by Vladek
Sheybal. Sheybal used to be on great TV
series like U.F.O. (likely the reason he got cast here) and was the
Chess-playing assassin in Terence Young’s 1963 James Bond classic From
Russia With Love. That association
was obviously Golan’s way of warning us of an evil Communist future. The Soviet Union collapsed, but this film is
still here. What a wreck!
The anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is not so good,
probably not stored very well, being in the Cannon vaults. At least it was shot in real Panavision by
David Gurfinkle, but what is shot looks cheap and each scene is some money
spent, then little money spent, then what was that? The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is limited and the film was issued
in regular Dolby A-type analog surround.
When played back in Pro-Logic, this sounds old and the surrounds are
very limited when they are there at all.
You get the trailer, which shows you pretty much all you need to see of
this film.
The title refers to temptation, but the film barely opened
anywhere, yet Cannon continued to make very, very bad films for years. If you want to see it, unless the genres
involved have a very strong interest for you, resist temptation! That is, if you actually have any.
- Nicholas Sheffo
