Guilty Pleasures: The Apple

Some movies are far beyond just "good," like Casablanca; some are beyond "bad," like Glen Or Glenda. And some very rare few are beyond either good or bad. I'm not sure what I mean by that, but if you've seen THE APPLE, from 1980, you might know. Set in an unspecified European country in the future year of 1994, a music conglomeration called BIM rules not only the music world, but most of pop culture, and, it's implied, even politics (you can be arrested if you're not wearing the BIM shiny triangle logo on your face). At the Worldvision Song Contest, the glossy BIM pop/rockers Dandi & Pandi (pictured below) are the singers to beat, but folkie duo Alphie and Bibi come so close to winning the audience's favor that BIM boss Mr. Boogalow has to rig the proceedings for his band to win. Alphie and Bibi go to Boogalow’s office for an audition; he offers to sign them but won't give them time to read their contracts; Bibi signs, selling her soul, it's implied not very subtly in a hallucination sequence with Boogalow as the devil (pictured above) but Alphie splits.

She becomes the next big BIM star while he lives the life of the starving artist, trying to get a record contract and win Bibi back. He tries to rescue her from a druggy orgy and fails, but Pandi, impressed by Alphie's dedication, talks Bibi into looking for him. She does and the two of them drop out to join a commune of ex-hippies led by the shaggy Mr. Topps. A year later (and I'm not making this up) when the BIM folks come to arrest Bibi for walking out on her contract, God, a rather seedy figure who looks like a slightly cleaned up Mr. Topps (same actor), arrives in a golden limousine in the sky and takes all the hippies with him to another planet. The end.

The Apple has one of the worst critical reputations of any movie this side of Ed Wood. And I'm fully aware that I'm damning it with faint praise when I say that it succeeds at being the camp musical that Xanadu and Can't Stop The Music desperately wanted to be. It feels like this was an attempt to manufacture a Rocky Horror-type movie and on that level, it fails: the songs aren't memorable, the acting is mostly atrocious (there's no Tim Curry to carry the show), and the pop culture satire is heavy-handed.

But what it does have is outrageous style; the sets and costumes look like the work of a bunch of sci-fi-fan drag queens who were given a big budget and a lot of drugs. The production numbers, which come fast and furiously about every five minutes, are great fun, much more enjoyable than anything in Xanadu (though the music in the Olivia Newton-John spectacle is better). The choreography is well executed, and one number, a nasty single-entendre sex disco song called "Coming for You," is Bob Fosse meets Donna Summer. Bibi's big hit is a song which compares America to a speed addict: "America, the land of the brave / Is popping pills to keep up the pace / And everyday she cries out for more… speeeeeeeeeed!"

It helps that the movie can be seen, like Network, as a prediction of where pop culture was heading; the chorus of one song says, "Life is nothing but show business in 1994," and it's fun to read Mr. Boogalow as a slightly more sinister Simon Cowell. The less said about the actors, the better, but here I go anyway. Catherine Mary Stewart (Bibi) went on to have a decent career in movies and TV; the same cannot be said for her partner, George Gilmour, who is glossily handsome in an 80's gay porn star way and has a vaguely European accent—he has no other credits on IMDb. He does, though, have a great, lithe 80's gay porn star body which he gets to show off briefly in the Hell hallucination number. Vladek Sheybal, who is OK as Boogalow, played a villain in From Russia With Love. The only actor I was actually familiar with is Miriam Margolyes (Age of Innocence, Ladies in Lavender) in the thankless role of Alphie's stereotypical Jewish-mother landlady.

I'm not happy with the gay vs. straight dichotomy that permeates the film; though there's only one gay character, Boogalow's assistant Shake, practically everyone associated with BIM can be read as, if not gay, at least perverse, compared to the Carpenters-like whitebread hetero wholesomeness of Alphie and Bibi. But the perverse folks are definitely having the most fun here, and frankly I have to recommend this film, if only because it is so very one-of-a-kind. I saw it on Turner Classic Movies, but it is on DVD.