Even stupid, derivative slasher movies – a category Bad Apples belongs in without a stabbing shadow of a doubt – really need to obey some rules of logic and common sense if the audience is to have even the slightest hope of buying into its story or caring about its characters. Sadly Bad Apples is just concerned with the stabbing – oh, so much stabbing – that it forgets to create a believable world in which its events are taking place; as a consequence the film’s protagonists – a young couple relocating into a small town away from the madness of LA – exist in a sort of bubble, a new environment which they barely and rarely engage with and supporting characters are little more than half-hearted (and repeatedly-stabbed) stereotypes.
We kick off with a pretty grim prologue in which a young pregnant woman is stabbed in the gut by her violent ex-partner who promptly slashes his own throat. Flash forward a few years and we meet Ella (Grant) and Robert (Skipper) as they move into their new home (their tragic backstory tumbles out artlessly towards the end of the film) on Halloween. Robert’s off to work the night shift at the local hospital leaving Ella at home, edgy and unnerved but keeping the house shrouded in darkness to avoid pesky trick-or-treaters. But two malevolent, masked teenage girls are on the rampage, breaking into random houses and slaughtering anyone they can stick their blades into. Their killing spree starts when they hack away at their school headmaster; his corpse is found by his secretary who had already witnessed the two masked girls in his office earlier in the day yet there’s no hint of any Police involvement or manhunt and indeed there seems to be no law enforcement presence in the town at all.
We’re already at the bottom of the hill and yet it’s downhill from here on. The girls break into a number of houses (we get no real sense of location and the film makes no significant attempt to make the town seem like a real place where people actually live) and set about tormenting and killing various townspeople including the local paedophile and a harmless older lady. Inevitably – but not really soon enough – the girls find their way into Ella and Robert’s place and Ella (who at one point get a knife in her back which she pulls out with no particularly serious or life-threatening consequences) has to both fight for her life and try to reason with the blood-crazed killer kids.
Bad Apples is flaccid, derivative fare. The story lack rationality and structure, the characters are hard to care about (the dialogue snaps along but Robert’s wise-cracking quickly becomes wearing) and a coda clearly intended to pull the strands of the story together is so badly-filmed and performed it looks as if it’s been lifted from a different and even worse movie. If you’re after a raw, simplistic slasher movie then Bad Apples might float your bloody boat for an hour or so but really this one’s pretty much rotten to the core.
BAD APPLES / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: BRYAN COYNE / STARRING: BREA GRANT, GRAHAM SKIPPER, ANDREA COLLINS, HANNAH PRITCHARD / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW (USA), TBC (UK)
