Really Awful Movies: Ep 50 – The Apple

In the 1979 Cannon Group musical mega-flop, The Apple, competing acts take to the stage in a song contest not unlike the Euro Vision one.

Anyway, a Canadian folk duo is robbed of their potential song contest win when BIM Records sabotages their performance with a high-pitched squeal from backstage (it’s folk music, so who would know?)

Soon though, the young Canadians are tempted in a Garden of Eden fashion (yep, that’s where the title’s derived, not the other Beatles’ Apple)

We find out that underhanded deals are being signed (hey, it’s the music business after all) and that in the far future (1994!) the music industry became so powerful and so indelibly linked to everyone’s very existence, that the label BIM has soared to basically Apple-like prominence in the zeitgeist (Apple Computers that is).

Guess nobody saw Napster coming.

In its one-star review, Slant said, “every song in the goddamned movie sucks.” Our slant is that there are a few good ones that’ll leave you humming for days, and that this disaster is pretty damn fun, with hilarious set-pieces and lost-in-translation elements (it was conceived as a Hebrew stage musical).

Please take a bite out of this Apple (and “don’t mind the maggots” to quote the Rolling Stones’ Shattered).

This is a fun, horribly misguided piece of cinema. And be sure to subscribe to the Really Awful Movies Podcast!