The Apple (1980) Review

By Alex Del Negro

It is a very rare and often wondrous thing when a work of film manages to transcend the boundaries of the medium in which it is created. When it inexplicably moves beyond the mere faculties of light and sound to produce an experience altogether greater than the sum of its rather common and unremarkable parts. That interaction, between the elements onscreen, between the viewer and the visual work, between the creator and the greater audience, is arguably where the art of the cinema lies. And it is from that interplay of elements that one can trace such a powerful and unique reaction that one often feels towards the otherwise ordinary phenomenon occurring before them.

In the case of The Apple, just such a reaction was evoked in the audience at its debut, which subsequently caused extensive damage to the theater and the screen on which the film was being shown, as well as presumably the souvenir soundtracks distributed to viewers beforehand when they were thrown through said screen, causing all that damage in the first place. But, then again, it was doubtful anyone much cared about the well-being of the soundtracks.

The Apple can best be described as a rock opera/musical with strong Christian overtones that foreshadow the dark, drug-shrouded future of America in 1994, as told by self-described refugees from the sixties from the perspective of 1980. And that pretty much makes The Apple the greatest film of all time.

Why?

The Future.

In no conceivable universe could any of those elements possibly come to coexist with each other in any serious way. Not even the laws of probability would allow it, as it is far more likely that a person, if they had, for instance, somehow managed to arrange every cinematic motif on a dart board before them, would undoubtedly destroy themselves through an improbable series of ricochets that ended with the dart traveling back in time to a point where it would kill the offending individual’s grandfather before such an individual would actually be able to string such an insane and incomparable list of possible movie elements together in the first place. Incidentally, how would a time-shifting dart possibly hope to kill anyone, you might ask? Just before the fatal incident, it somehow stuck itself in a poisonous frog.

It’s that improbable.

Yet, because there is absolutely no way in which this film could possibly exist, the fact that it does means that it is therefore the most important, and thereby greatest, singular work of all time. It stands stoically as a testament to humanity’s indomitable ability to create from nothing such massive affronts to nature and temporal physics that, if aliens do in fact exist–and there is no reason to believe that they don’t considering such a possibility is also more probable than the existence of this film–they are undoubtedly already hard at work trying come up with ways of destroying our forlorn little planet before such ravaging and destructive tendencies of ours expand beyond their source.

The film follows the story of two struggling musicians; Alphie and Bibi, and their fight to retain their innocence and individuality in the face of the not-so-subtly satanic record producer Mr. Boogalow. Boogalow, aside from being played by a former Bond villain and evil Soviet Colonel in Red Dawn, also forces everyone in the world to wear his own personal “Bim Mark;” and has the astonishing ability of surrounding himself with individuals who break out into complex singing and dance routines in the most unlikely of places. That is not to say that because the songs are complex, they are therefore any good, of course. But, like the rest of the film proper, the lyrics to the individual numbers are so unlikely to exist as a result of a rational and objective mind that they are, in turn, the greatest anyone will ever hope to hear. As one small example, consider the following selection from a number on the subject of temptation:

It’s totally natural to want this. You’re not weird at all. Just look at him.

“It’s a natural, natural, natural deSIREEEEE!
Meet an actual, actual, actual vamPIREEEEE!”

At which point a man wearing plastic fangs and a cape walks out and hisses at the camera.

How does anyone look at something like that and think–in all seriousness, without any eye to comedy or satire–that it is a good idea? How, indeed, does anyone go on to construct an entire film full of similar such examples; concluding with the ghostly images of what can only be described as an army of hippies parading after a God-like figure into the sky on the back of an old roadster? Such ideas are not the realm of a rational, sane individual. They are the product of a deranged mind irrevocably altered by the warped machinations of temporal improbability. And, because it is clear that such a perfect storm of improbable events that contributed to The Apple’s creation will never be able to repeat itself, it is therefore, without any shadow of a doubt, the greatest and most unique film of all time. We must therefore cherish it; safe in the knowledge that it represents both the pinnacle of cinema, as well as a phenomenon which, fortunately for all of us subjected to the work’s madness, is something that will never, ever happen again.

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