Review #335: April Fool's Day (1986)

October 2025 Holiday Horror Review #8 - April Fool's Day (1986)

[This movie does not appear to be streaming anywhere for free, but it is available for rent and purchase on various platforms.]

April Fool's Day is a movie about a girl named Muffy who invited a bunch of her college friends to a weekend birthday party at the private island hotel she's recently inherited after her mother's death. Since Muffy was born on April Fool's Day, she's had an interesting relationship with pranks and practical jokes, ever since she was a child and was given a jack-in-the-box with a scary monster puppet inside. So of course the weekend is full of practical jokes among all of her friends- but after one of the workers on the ferry was severely injured while transporting everyone to the island, there seems to be a sinister force taking out a very real and very deadly revenge against the partygoers- or is murder and mayhem part of Muffy's planned weekend after all?

I do need to say, this movie has a pretty big reveal near the end that recontextualizes a lot of the movie, and it's going to be hard to talk about it beyond surface-level without spoiling it. I think this is a very good movie and you should all go watch it, and if anyone hasn't seen the movie yet but you want my rating, I think this movie is a 8/10. (8/10 Broken Faucets That Spray You In the Face, or something.) For everyone who's either seen the movie or don't plan to, you have been warned, spoilers ahead!

Alright. I've seen this movie before, maybe like fifteen years ago. I remember thinking it was kind of lackluster, I probably only paid half attention to it, but then the twist at the end took me by such surprise and it worked so well that it retroactively made the rest of the movie WAY better than it had been. On this watch, knowing the twist in advance (I'll get to what it is in a minute, I still gotta put some space so scrollers don't see it by accident) and having that context from the start actually kind of made it a little less exciting; I know most twists have the potential to ruin future rewatches but this didn't exactly ruin it, it just dampened it a little bit. My first watch was probably something like a 9/10, but the second wasn't quite as good.

So, we're introduced to all of these 80s college kids, which range from boring to annoyingly energetic to "Hey, I've seen that person in other 80s slashers". The setting for this movie (the big private hotel set up for this weekend party) is really fun, and I'm starting to learn that I'm a huge sucker for movies where everyone is at a party and then they can't leave because there's a killer about. All of the characters are fairly well-realized, there's a lot of fun banter between them, and the pranks that persist through the first half of the film never failed to get a laugh out of me.

And now, the twist: after several dead bodies have turned up and several other people are still missing and the two surviving protagonists uncover all of the details that reveal that their friend Muffy has a twin sister who recently escaped from a mental institute, the final confrontation leads to an even bigger reveal that actually, this was all fake. Nobody died or even was injured. Muffy inherited this property but she needs to be able to make money off of it, so she planned out essentially a murder mystery weekend, and wanted to run a live playthrough of it before moving forward to see if it worked. (It's thankfully explained that paying customers will know in advance that this is all a play, but she wanted to do it practically because she just loves pranks so much.) Throughout my first watchthrough I remember having a lot of complaints about how contrived everything seemed, and of course that's because it was! The plot and the production of this film were clearly started with this reveal as the end goal so it really looks like they succeeded on a lot of fronts.

It's still not perfect- as I said, knowing the reveal made it a bit less exciting and there weren't as many little noticeable tells as I was hoping there would be. Also didn't one of the characters bring a gun in his suitcase? I remember him getting the gun once things started going down but I don't recall him ever firing it. Obviously in an actual performance of this murder mystery weekend the guests would know not to use lethal force on the performers, but what was Muffy going to do if one of her friends fired on her in perceived self-defense?

Anyway, I think this movie was a lot of fun and I'm happy I rewatched it. It's got a great vibe and some good scares and a fantastic ending.

Overall Rating: 8/10 Broken Faucets That Spray You In the Face, or something

Life Imitates Art: Near the start of the film, a prank done by the character Skip (played by Griffin O'Neal) appears to result in a boatworker getting grievously injured. The year after this film premiered, Griffin O'Neal was indicted on manslaughter charges for a boating accident that took the life of film producer Gian-Carlo Coppola. Someone get this man away from the water!