April Fools (2007) and the Retelling of Stories

In honor of April Fool’s Day being this week, the choice for the bad movie was one that would be befitting of the day.  April Fools is a 2007 direct-to-video release starring Obba Babatunde and Lamorne Morris among others.  It also features a performance by Lil’ Flip.  The movie is basically a retelling of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but with black actors in the place of all the whiteys.  This got me to thinking.  There are a lot of movies that copy the storylines from other movies.  What makes some work while others don’t?

In this case, the quality of the movie comes down to the quality of the filmmaking.  I’m not going to outright say that a movie that copies the story of another is outright bad.  That is not the case at all.  But it has become increasingly noticeable to me how many movies actually take their stories from other movies.  In the case of April Fools, the story seems like a copy of I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was, in its own way, a repeat of 1980’s Prom Night.  All three movies are similar in their hook and overall story, but they vary in different aspect.

Prom Night was a 1980 movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis and featuring Leslie Nielsen. It was about a group of high school kids who accidentally caused the death of another child years earlier.  On the night of their prom, someone has come to seek revenge on them.  They begin to be murdered, one by one.  It’s a fairly basic premise that has been repeated over the years.  Such as in 1997.

In 1997, I Know What You Did Last Summer was released.  This was part of that late 90s rejuvenation of horror led by writer Kevin Williamson.  It starred such 90s stars as Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillippe, and Freddie Prinze Jr.  In a story similar to that of 1980’s Prom Night, a group of teenagers accidentally runs over a man with their car.  They dispose of the body and promise not to tell anyone.  A year later, a killer has come to seek revenge upon them for their murderous ways.  The teenagers begin to die.  See the similarity?  Now let’s move to 2007.

The direct-to-video release of April Fools marks one of the many times a movie has been released with this similar storyline.  A group of teenagers play a prank on a friend.  This prank inadvertently causes the death of the friend.  The group decides to make it look like a gang killing, and tell nobody about what happened.  A year or so later, someone begins killing the teenagers in revenge for what they have done.  It’s the same story again!

Three different decades, and almost thirty years spanned.  The story keeps repeating itself through the years.  Of course, this isn’t the only time that one story has been repeated endlessly.  I’m sure that Seven Samurai has just as many iterations as Prom Night.  And I’m not saying that the quality of any movie is dependent on the storyline.  There are good and bad retellings of any story.  It just so happens that April Fools is a poor retelling of the story.

Where should I start with how bad April Fools was made?  Well, since I’m talking about the writing, I might as well describe the writing.  None of the characters in the movie are all that likeable.  If they are likeable, which I don’t think they are, they surely aren’t relatable.  This is a problem when working in the horror genre.  There needs to be one character for the audience to connect to so that the audience can be scared along with that character.  That character doesn’t exist in this movie.  This is only the beginning of what was wrong with the movie.

April Fools looks like it was put together as an April Fool’s Day joke.  The opening scene is decently acted and shot, so much so that about 70% of the remainder of the movie is spent flashing back to that scene.  The rest of the movie looks like someone took a broken camcorder, took the product of that, and mixed it with exterior shots from the 90s children’s show Zoom.  It looks like crap.  It was 2007 when the movie as released.  Surely, there could have been some better work done in the filming.

There isn’t much left to explain about how the movie does not succeed in what it attempts.  It is one of those cases where watching the movie would make it glaringly obvious, but writing about it does not.

So, it’s not the story itself that brings April Fools down.  It all comes down to the incompetent way in which the movie was made.  The story has worked before, in movies such as the aforementioned Prom Night and I Know What You Did Last Summer.  It didn’t work this time because the movie was poorly made.  That saddens me but does not surprise me.  They can’t all be hits.  There need to be misses to balance the movie universe.  April Fools is a miss.

 There are some notes I would like to make:

• If you have any suggestions for bad movies, leave a comment or talk to me on Twitter.
• This movie was suggested by @SubatomicCowboy.