April Fool's Day
Short description
A group of college friends accepts an invitation from Muffy St. John to spend April Fool's Day weekend at her family's house on an island, a property reachable only by ferry, to mark the end of their school years. Muffy is known for her practical jokes, and the April 1 holiday gives the gathering a playful pretext. The mood changes once a guest goes missing and another claims to have seen a body that cannot be found. As more of the visitors disappear and the group loses contact with the mainland, panic builds, and the question becomes whether a killer is at work on the island or whether the whole weekend is an elaborate prank.
Fred Walton directed the film, the second in the sequence of his features after When a Stranger Calls, from a screenplay by Danilo Bach; Frank Mancuso Jr. produced. Amy Steel plays Kit Graham, with Ken Olandt, Deborah Foreman, Deborah Goodrich, Clayton Rohner and Thomas F. Wilson among the cast. Made for about 5 million dollars, it runs 89 minutes and mixes horror with mystery.
Audience response has been moderate: on IMDb the film holds 6.1 out of 10 from some 18,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6 out of 10 from a much smaller pool of under 400 voters. A critics' rating of 5.6 out of 10 from 24 reviews places critical opinion in roughly the same range as the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- One day on set, Deborah Goodrich began reading questions from Cosmopolitan magazine aloud to the other actresses. This caught the attention of director Fred Walton. A couple of days later, he brought the actress a new magazine and a new list of questions and asked her to come up with a scene, which ultimately made it into the film.
- At the beginning of the film, Griffin O’Neal’s character is accused of a joke going too far and disfiguring a person. The following year, O’Neal was accused and convicted of manslaughter when Francis Ford Coppola’s son, Gian-Carlo Coppola (1963-1986), died.
- The actors involved in the film gathered at a hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, shortly before filming began to get to know each other better, as they were to play old friends.
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