APRIL FOOL'S DAY @ 40: Spoilers

Muffy walks through her parents' mansion, preparing for guests. She finds a Jack in the box that first looses a mild scare but then, in a haze of childhood memories, shoots a monster out. Meanwhile, her guests gather at a jetty to take them to the mansion on the island across the lake. Like Muffy, they're all teritary students preparing for Spring Break. The first you see of them is the hot young Nikki who appears in the 4x3 frame of a camcorder like a found footage movie from the next decade. The rest reveal their character keynotes and when a knife fight starts among them that escalates into an overboard conflict it's soon revealed as a prank. It's the first of April, like the title says. Everyone's happy but then the ferry deckhand Buck falls off as the boat is docking and gets between the hull and the jetty on the island. Half his face crushed and bloody, he gets taken back to the mainland for hospitalisation. Not a prank.

Muffy meets and greets and treats them to a champagne dinner where everyone reveals a little about themselves and gets well pissed. There are already some ructions that we note as telescope views before everyone turns in and finds a world of pranks like lights behaving oddly, bathroom sinks spraying the wrong way and so on. But there is Nan's room whose wardrobe houses a cassette of a baby crying. We aren't told but we know she either miscarried or had an abortion. Another of the good eggs finds smack paraphenalia in his medicine cabinet. Some pranks have claws.

Into the night and the next day the gang find themselves in a kind of whodunnit rollcall that takes a leaf or two out of the then new slasher playbook. We discover various ambitions, frustrations, shared secrets and denials and wait for the corpses to pile and the elimination to lead to the killer. 

Already, the pacing and the more social concerns are diverging from the average '80s teen thriller. The killer doesn't seem to mind if the victims are having sex or not. There's sexual fluidity that is stated but never judged and not offered as a motive. There is a world of mid-'80s middle class concern of young adults going through their education and initial steps into the grown up world and, while it doesn't play like a 20-something Big Chill, the focus on the notion that Reganomics might not be the answer. The cigar stealing walking sales pitch who is clearly heading for yuppiedom gets a slapstick prank and then a serious hit. Wits are a better armour here.

SPOILERS

And then when the crew are reduced to a couple (one of whom is played by Amy Steel, the champion final girl of F13 Part II) who have discovered Muffy's terrible family secret, they break through and find that everyone is fine and waiting for them. Muffy announces over a trolley of champagne that they all been part of a test for her plan to use the house as a proto escape room scenario. Everyone laughs. Then there's a coda scene which I won't spoil.

April Fool's Day is a lot less like Terror Train or Friday the 13th than the meta teen horrors of the following decade. While the cast are not listing the genre traits of teen horrors while watching one in the living room, there is a sense of play and a wink between the screen and the audience as to what is happening. If the big reveal feels a little smug, Muffy's business plan provides a knowing cynicism that shades the ambitions of the crew of chums with a clear contempt. And then the coda takes this a step further, suggesting that the franchise will have some serious extra spice to it when it starts working.

The other thing this film reminds me of is American Psycho, also in its future. While it goes nowhere near the core of that novel and later adaptation, the hint that a class and business based entertainment franchise that appeals to ruthlessness and grand guignol violence might be just the thing for the times paves the way. This film will not work if you approach it as a mid-level slasher. It doesn't quite work as a satire, either. Considering the likes of Something Wild which wasn't the comedy its poster tried to sell, it might well serve as a retrospective warning to the culture it was part of, that times soon to come would take some careful navigation. As that, it works.