BAD APPLES (2018)

Studio:       Uncork’d Entertainment
Director:    Brian Coyne
Writer:       Brian Coyne
Producer:  Josh Russell, Sierra Russell, Jason Miller, Brian Coyne
Stars:     Brea Grant, Graham Skipper, Alycia Lourim, Heather Vaughn, Richard Riehle, Diane Goldner, Miles Dougal

Review Score:

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Summary:

Twin sisters terrorize residents of a suburban neighborhood on Halloween night, including the new teacher at their school.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

October 31st – After trick-or-treaters depart, a man infiltrates a pregnant woman’s apartment and stabs her to death before slitting his own throat. The woman’s husband discovers the bodies upon returning home.

October 30th – Teenage twin sisters leave the trailer where they live and head to school wearing their Halloween masks.

Having just moved to town with her husband Robert, Ella Block meets with Principal Dale in advance of starting work as a teacher at the school the following week. Ella returns home to Robert, who later leaves to pick up Halloween decorations.

Ella’s odd neighbor Mrs. Dekker comes to the door to introduce herself. Mrs. Dekker warns Ella that their neighbor Samuel is a registered sex offender.

The sisters are sent to Principal Dale’s office for refusing to remove their masks. When he tries taking the masks off himself, the girls beat Principal Dale to death. The receptionist finds the principal with a flag impaled in his torso.

After Robert returns, he and Ella see Samuel smoking outside their house. Based on Mrs. Dekker’s warning, Ella makes a disparaging comment about Samuel. Robert goes outside to introduce himself, yet calmly asks Samuel to leave, leading to an awkward conversation in which Samuel repeats what Ella said. Robert then warns Ella to be more careful about what she says, sparking a minor argument between the couple.

As Halloween night falls, the masked sisters sneak into another woman’s trailer. The girls steal the woman’s handgun. They then beat the woman with a garden gnome before shooting her.

The sisters break into Samuel’s house next. After brutally torturing him, the girls leave Samuel for dead.

Robert leaves Ella home alone to work his night shift at the hospital. At the hospital, Robert meets his coworker Macy.

The sisters break into Mrs. Dekker’s house. The girls murder Mrs. Dekker.

The twins come to Ella’s door. Ella tries dismissing them, but the girls sneak in, destroy Ella’s phone, and begin torturing Ella as they pursue her throughout the house. The sisters continue tormenting Ella until she eventually collapses.

Samuel is rushed to the ER after activating his Life Alert. Recognizing Samuel and suddenly panicking, Robert tries calling Ella. Robert confides in Macy that he and Ella have had a difficult time since the death of their infant daughter Melissa. Macy tells Robert to go home to his wife.

Robert returns to the house. The sisters murder Robert by turning his torso into a jack-o-lantern.

Ella recovers to find her husband mutilated. Despondent, Ella tells the girls to just kill her. Instead, the twins throw down their knives and turn to leave. Ella recovers one of the knives and murders both girls. Ella then removes their masks before staggering outside into sunlight and sobbing on the lawn.

Coda – October 31st – Sandy and Mandy playfully torment their friend Kat by telling her the story of the pregnant woman who died in Kat’s apartment 15 years earlier. Sandy explains that the pregnant woman had left her abusive boyfriend for another man. The vengeful boyfriend then murdered the woman and killed himself on Halloween, but their twins survived to go on a killing spree 14 years later. Sandy claims that the twins are still alive because their bodies were never found. Left alone later that night, Kat hears a knock at her door and footsteps stalking around her apartment.

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Review:

Title credits in Albertus font.  A simple electronic score created with a keyboard.  A first-person shot from behind a mask’s eyeholes.  Faceless murderers with no agenda other than slaughtering suburbia on Halloween night.  “Bad Apples” badly wants to be in John Carpenter’s orbit, but it isn’t even competent enough to be considered Ed Wood adjacent.

The straightforward premise concerns two teenage sisters from the wrong side of a small town’s tracks.  Uttering only a few words throughout the quick film, the unidentified girls don frozen-faced masks and embark on a Halloween night killing spree across a quiet suburban setting.  At the end of the sisters’ path lies the home of a husband and wife who’ve just moved in, and who may not survive long enough to unpack.  That’s all there is to it.

I’d like to optimistically assume that the edit I watched was unfinished.  Sound effects were noticeably absent, audio levels fluctuated all over the place, and poor color timing changed the tint of one victim’s blood midway through a scene.  Even if that’s the case, I assure you that any “fixed” final cut you see, should you willingly choose to punish yourself, will still feature scenes with no more than two camera setups, unimportant close-ups of inconsequential inserts like a ceramic coffee mug, and a subtly swaying camera inducing seasickness from not taking the time to attach to a tripod.

Awful audio offends the ears as much as unappealing visuals upset the eyes.  Dialogue routinely echoes due to poorly placed microphones or being bounced off tight walls.  One actor’s breath blows out distortion with every exhale.  The music fits the mood, but there is only one line of it repeated continuously.  It’s a 60-second score for an 84-minute film.

Looped noise comically plays in a prologue when one woman opens her door.  We don’t see the trick-or-treaters, and the woman only passes out one or two pieces of candy.  Yet we hear what sounds like a dog toy being faintly squeezed rapidly to create a cacophonous orchestra of children that couldn’t possibly fit on this tiny apartment doorstep.

“Bad Apples” wears its origins as a homegrown microbudget movie on its sleeve.  Two of the producers also did makeup effects.  The composer pulled double duty as the colorist.  This is a skeletal cheapie made with favors, family, and friends that I normally know to stay away from.

I took the plunge anyway because likable indie horror staples Brea Grant and Graham Skipper headline the top two roles.  Either one of them is susceptible to appearing in an occasional bad movie.  That’s par for the course in genre entertainment.  But could they make the same ill-advised decision to be in the same bad movie together?

Maybe Grant and Skipper are personal friends of writer/director Brian Coyne or someone else involved with the production, I don’t know.  I do know that neither one of them has any hope of salvaging “Bad Apples.”

Brea Grant plays a consistently annoyed, moping, or otherwise detached woman.  She couldn’t care less about moving into her new home or meeting any neighbors.  She appears unenthusiastic about anything involving her husband, even using “I hate you” as a term of endearment.  A later revelation offers some justification for her despondency, although realistically, this is still the wrong way to mute Grant’s usually buoyant presence.  Grant doesn’t read as a woman imprisoned by internalized misery.  She reads as an actress trapped by boredom, further dejected from the realization that she has no escape route.

Grant’s sleepy grimness struggles mightily to create chemistry with Graham Skipper.  Skipper then tries over-hard to infuse some sort of charming characterization into drab dialogue.  His efforts at inflection appear even more desperate when stacked against Grant’s dourness, making their forced interchanges painful instead of playful.

It isn’t enjoyable to witness Grant and Skipper fighting to be interesting or interested.  Hopefully they’ve satisfied whatever obligations were due or reaped reasonable wages.  “Bad Apples” won’t be a bullet point on the back of either actor’s headshot.

“Bad Apples” is such a slim effort, there isn’t much else to say without continuing to kick the film while it’s down.  From the high school ‘kid’ who, I’m not exaggerating, is almost entirely bald, to an overlong coda thinking it offers a clever twist, nothing works the way it should.  Whether the film was rushed, underfunded, or its creators simply didn’t care doesn’t matter.  Spartan structure and sloppy style make “Bad Apples” an abysmally unsatisfying movie.

Review Score:  20

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