The Apple

Back in December 2021 I reviewed the highly entertaining documentary Electric Boogaloo, about Israeli director-producer Menahem Golan, his cousin Yoran Globus, and their attempt to break into Hollywood that eventually saw them running Cannon Films in the 1980s. One of the things said about Golan in that movie is that he probably sincerely wanted to make good movies, but his lack of Americans' cultural tastes meant that almost everything he did wound up being slightly off. I couldn't help but think about that comment as I was watching one the earliest films he was involved in (this time as director), The Apple.

The movie was released in 1980, but set in the future of... 1994, which is already a sign that there's a good chance the movie is going to be a spectacular mess. The movie opens up at something called the Worldvision Song Contest, an obvious rip-off of Eurovision that sees some formulaic rock band performing a forgettable number that has the audience in a tizzy. That's because the group is managed by BIM, or Boogalow International Music, run by Mr. Boogalow (Vladek Sheybal) and his assistant Shake (Ray Shell in a bizarrely campy portrayal). Next up is a Canadian duo doing something that's totally out of place for a world in which rock and disco merged and remained popular: a love balled. The audience loves it at first, but Boogalow rigs the contest so that the duo, Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), lose the contest.

Boogalow is no dummy however, since he's been successful enough that BIM pretty much runs the rest of the world, this being one of those dystopias in which we're all governed by corporation. (To be fair, Pfizer and Moderna nearly got their way in trying to subject us to a world with mandatory vaccinations designed solely to boost their bottom lines, and half the population was actively rooting for this.) So Boogalow offers Alphie and Bibi a contract! The thinking is that then he'll be able to control Alphie and Bibi and turn their talents toward BIM's propagandistic ends.

Alphie realizes this probably isn't a good thing, particularly considering the amount of pressure BIM is putting on them to sign the contract right now. Alphie has thoughts (or perhaps hallucinations) of this being like a Brodway musical verion of selling one's soul to the devil, complete with a Busby Berkeley-like musical number. Bibi only sees dollar signs, and signs the contract, separating the two.

Bibi becomes a cookie-cutter star in much the same way Korean entertainment companies have churned out one overproduced K-crap group after another like BTS, while Alphie is forced to roam the wilderness like Moses (apparently, a deleted production number made the biblical genesis of the story more explicit), while trying to stay out of trouble with the authorities, who by now have started to do things like mandatory BIM aerobics and forcing everyone to wear the mark of BIM. Alphie has to go back to the BIM underworld to try to rescue Bibi, with the two winding up in a hippie colony that's persecuted even more than anyone thinks 1960s hippies might have been. Along the way, there's a series of spectacularly overdone musical numbers.

Pretty much everybody who writes non-professional reviews of The Apple talks about how unbelievably bad it is, but at the same time how entertaining it is because of how every bit of the movie goes so totally wrong in a way Menahem Golan had no idea was going to happen. The musical numbers are an energetic hoot even if the songs are terrible. The acting is mostly bad or at best over the top, and the plot is a mess even if you can see the way this is a basic good versus evil story. Worst, they didn't know how to end the movie so just have a literal deus ex machina to end things!

And yet, I would highly recommend finding a copy of The Apple and watching it. Like everybody else, I agree that the fact it's such a spectacular disaster is what makes it so incredibly entertaining.