“He’s so eager to believe/ And so easily deceived/ Like a baby watching magic/ He’s so gullible it’s tragic.” – The Apple – (My Favorite Bad Movies)

Ummmmm.. What?

How does one describe The Apple? It’s a futuristic morality play that is cheesily realized and not terribly moral. To director Menahem Golan the future (distant 1994 to be exact) seemed to consist entirely of people wearing spandex, animal prints, and neon lame.

The first time I saw it, I really didn’t know anything about it. In the beginning it seems to be a straightforward story of young people being seduced by the glamour of the music industry. A duo of folk singers that lose at an American Idol-like singing contest, but are noticed by Mr. Boogalow, the most powerful music producer of 1994. He invites them to a party and suddenly, in the middle of the debauched festivities, this happens:

I remember yelling out, “What the hell is going on?!?” Nothing that preceded it prepared me for the movie turning into a musical. And the rest of the movie is a procession of one sidesplitting musical number after another as the young pair of singers are alternately mesmerized and horrified by the high life. The girl is dazzled by the glitzy new world, while her head-on-his-shoulders boyfriend is not fooled by the readily available sex and drugs. The movie really falls off the rails when it turns into an ill-conceived religious parable, complete with a breathtakingly hilarious musical number in hell and a visit from God himself or, as he calls himself, Mr. Tops, who leads all the good hippies off into the clouds. The Apple could have been subtitled All Hippies Go to Heaven.

There were several more scenes and numbers I could have posted here (including the aforementioned number in Hell), but I’ll just post this bit of inanity, which looks like a cross between a Vegas floorshow and a junior college production of Jesus Christ Superstar staged in the lobby of a Midwestern convention center.

It’s brilliant – and not for the reasons intended.