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An innocent
teenage boy ends up dead when a group of
students take an April fools prank one step too far.
They decide to make it look like a shoot-out and keep
their dark secret with them to the grave. Now, it's a
year later and it doesn't take long before someone
starts killing off the friends, leaving a bloody
message next to the dead bodies... April Fools.
The back of the DVD sleeve reads "I know what you did
last summer... with an urban twist" which to me
sounded like "I know what you did last summer... with
a black cast and a lower budget", and guess what?
I was actually right. April Fools is a low-rent urban
slasher flick with an extremely thin story that's
been watered out with lots and lots of fodder material
such as flashbacks and poor slow-motion scenes. Do I
really have to tell you that I'm not going to spend a
whole lot of time writing this review? I think not.
April Fools has a good concept really where a dorky
guy gets killed when an april fools prank goes wrong.
The friends who have just become guilty of manslaughter
decide to guise it like he was killed in a gang
shoot-out and forget that the whole thing ever happened.
One year later, the friends start getting killed one
by one by a masked killer. Who could it be? I think
most of us have all grown pretty sick of low-rent
slasher flicks like this by now and I was actually
kind of pleased to see that the running time of the
movie was only 63 minutes (without ending and opening
credits). Unfortunately, those 63 minutes are anything
but entertaining.
This could easily have been the sequel to Ax'Em as the
movie looks like it was shot in the 80s due to the poor
picture quality. Seriously, it looks like someone
downloaded an illegal vhs-rip of the movie, used a
whole lot of edge-enhancer, put it on another vhs tape,
copied it to a friend, who then put it on DVD. That's
how bad the picture quality is. What's strange is that
the movie occasionally looks good, it's not often, but
some scenes look like they were shot with a completely
different camera. This doesn't affect the outcome of
the movie much though.
The death scenes, which of most are off-screen, are
really pathetic. You can see that the knife never even
brushes against the victim and to try to cover up the
fact that the killer had to be careful fake-stabbing
his victims, all death scenes are shown in slow-motion.
The directing is also quite dreadful and none of the
angles used in the entire movie are very flattering
for the group of incompetent actors. This was obviously
not an attempt to make a successful horror flick, it
seemed to me like some friends went together and
decided that there weren't enough generic urban slasher
flicks out there and tried to make their own.
I have yet to see a single great urban slasher flick
and April Fools is on the same level as movies such as
"Cutthroat Alley" and "Ax'Em". Sure, the cover-art may
be intriguing, but don't be fooled, this is just another
lame attempt at making a slasher flick with no budget
at all. People, people, people, if you're going to make
your own slasher movie with no money at all, please
make sure that it's never officially released because
it is killing the reviewers out there, okay?
Are you kidding me?
Decent hip-hop score, not my kind of music but suitable
for the concept, if you can call it that.
Urban slasher flicks are rarely good and we've had
Cutthroat Alley, Ax'Em, Urban Massacre and now April
Fools to prove that. This is a very short, very dull,
very low-budget slasher flick with a cover-art that
probably cost more to make than the entire movie. And
if you think that the cover-art is generic, just wait
until you see the movie... oh wait, DON'T!
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