What at first appears to be yet another bog standard stalk and slash flick in which a gang of annoying teens take themselves off to a remote location, there to be hacked to pieces by the obligatory psycho, turns out to be even more dishonest and manipulative than most. April Fools Day came as a huge disappointment from director Fred Walton who had made the so-much-better When a Stranger Calls (1979) – sadly there’s nothing here as sharp or inventive as his debut.
It’s April Fools Day and a group of disposable and young people accept an invitation from wealthy college friend Muffy St John (Deborah Foreman) to spend the weekend at her family’s private island. Muffy has rigged the house with seemingly harmless tricks and traps but it isn’t long before the bodies start piling up and it soon becomes impossible to tell what is meant to be a harmless prank and what could be a deadly “joke.”
This tedious and derivative thriller is slow to get started and when it does it has absolutely nothing new to add to an already overcrowded genre. Little use is made of the isolated island setting, the characters are weak and uninvolving (despite lengthy soap opera-style scenes of them emoting furiously) and Walton’s direction is unexpectedly flat and dreary. By the time the killings start, the audience is so bored by it all that it’s probably too late to save it anyway.
Producer Frank Mancuso Jr previously produced a handful of the Friday the 13th series, clearly this particular film’s main source of inspiration, the second of which also featured Amy Steel in a very similar role to the one she plays here – things were obviously so bad for the stalk and slash genre by this stage that not only were they recycling the same scripts but many of the same personnel too.
Just in case you you might be tempted to waste time on this dud; the ‘killer’ turns out to be one of the teens, the loopy Muffy – and with a name like that, wouldn’t you be just a bit loopy too? – and… Well, no that’s a lie actually, I was just trying to make things seem a little more interesting than they actually are – in truth, there is no killer. It all turns out to be a gigantic April Fools joke perpetrated by Muffy as a rehearsal for the Murder Mystery weekends she plans to hold at her old family home. Just what the world really needed – a stalk and slash film with no real stalking or slashing… But there is, naturally, a twist in the tale and even that turns out to be a stupid practical joke. Yes I’ve spoiled it for you but take that as a good thing – now you don’t have to watch the damned thing. Avoid for the sake of your sanity.
There were a couple of other slashers that, if only briefly, used the same or similar titles – Slaughter High (1986) was briefly known as April Fool’s Day before its title was changed and Killer Party (1986) was shot as The April Fool before being renamed to avoid a clash with Walton’s film. Not long after Walton’s bottom of the barrel entry was released, the genre died, only to be spectacularly reborn in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), only this time, they weren’t called stalk and slash, they were re-dubbed serial killer movies in a blatant attempt to fool an already jaded public. For reasons that escape all logic and sense, April Fool’s Day was remade in 2008 by The Butcher Brothers (Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores).
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