Okay, so it’s Halloween night–check. There are two creepy kids–check who decide to go on a murderous rampage–check on their birthday, a product of a pregnant woman stabbed to death by Halloween–check again, but somehow these little shits survive. They don mildly creepy Party City masks–check and they’ll kill anyone who doesn’t celebrate Halloween or just whoever they feel like–check.

Yes, Bad Apples is everything you’ve seen in every slasher film ever, and a little too much so.

As far as low-budget masked intruder films go in the post-Y2K world, the ultimate posterchild was Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008), which made a broken record player sound so menacing and memorable that I still get it stuck in my head every so often. (You’re thinking about it now, aren’t you?) It’s difficult to compare other modern creepy-mask slasher films to the terror created in The Strangers, but many have tried, from The Purge (2013) to You’re Next (2013), and now to Bad Apples.

Part of what made The Strangers so successful was not only the isolation but the fact that it makes a clear point of the masked killers having absolutely no reason to torture people. Somehow, it’s the declared pointlessness that made it make sense. The three killers just wanted to have some fun in the middle of fucking nowhere. (Can you blame them?)

I’m not sure how badly Bad Apples wanted this kind of success with their widely overdone Halloween/masked killer/creepy kids thing. Aside from a weak exposition and a lack of character development, it didn’t have a point, but it also didn’t have NO point. Am I making sense?

The fact that it had neither a point or no point was reflected in the acting and general reactions from each character–not bad, just unmotivated.

The film isn’t all bad, and I’m always one to dig a nice 80s slasher throwback in the year 2018. More than anything, it’s an homage to Halloween and other voyeuristic slasher films that set the bar for all future ones to follow. Parts of it were pretty good-looking too, despite a bit of lighting and sound issues. I get what writer/director Bryan Coyne was going for, but it was too sloppy to be a true horror film, and too serious to be a horror comedy. Bad Apples had the opportunity to, ironically, breathe a new life into the genre, but unfortunately fell into the same holes that nearly every other film of its kind had before.

The slasher film’s not dead, it just deserves to die when it becomes another stale cartoon. (Look up a song called Chickenshit Conformist so I don’t get in trouble for making that reference.)