{"id":75229,"date":"2014-08-11T19:01:39","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T23:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=75229"},"modified":"2014-08-11T19:01:39","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T23:01:39","slug":"taste-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/11\/taste-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Taste It!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pIvTIG3tWok?rel=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Menahem Golan, the B-Movie auteur, is dead at eighty-five, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2014\/08\/11\/arts\/menahem-golan-passionate-auteur-of-the-b-movie-is-dead-at-85.html?ref=obituaries\">the <em>Times <\/em>reports<\/a>. In the course of his prolific career, Golan\u2014who directed more than forty films and produced more than two hundred\u2014worked with Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Vanessa Redgrave; though he had a hand in several distinguished productions, he and his cohort trafficked in unabashedly debased material. The Golan milieu is one of superabundant corn-starch blood and suspenseful synthesizer sound tracks. As the <em>Times<\/em> has it, they \u201cchurned out movies about ninjas, cyborgs, chain saws, and the likes of <em>Teenage Bonnie and Klepto Clyde<\/em> (1993).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A bit of YouTube spelunking has led me to <em>The Apple<\/em>, a 1980 musical written, directed, and produced by Golan\u2014perhaps one of the most gloriously catastrophic concepts ever committed to celluloid.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA young couple enters the world of the music industry, but also the world of drugs,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0080380\/?ref_=nm_flmg_prd_175\">the IMDB description reads<\/a>, as if those worlds have ever been separate\u2014and to that synopsis, allow me to add that the movie takes place in a dystopian future that\u2019s very, very, very far away: it\u2019s set in 1994. (\u201cLife is nothing but show business \/ in 1994,\u201d one song tells us, helpfully.)<\/p>\n<p>In <em>The Apple, <\/em>Boogaloo International Music (BIM) controls the world\u2014in the movie\u2019s one prescient plot point, the citizenry is addicted to \u201cthe Worldvision Song Contest,\u201d a talent show almost identical to <em>American Idol<\/em> or <em>Eurovision<\/em>. Any similarities to the actual future end there. BIM, headed by the nefarious Mr. Boogaloo, judges the success of its performers by counting the number of heartbeats in the crowd; when a sweet young couple threatens to overtake BIM\u2019s pre-selected stars in the heartbeat rankings, Boogaloo throws the contest, invites the innocent couple to his swanky corporate HQ, and has his henchman drug the young woman. Things get progressively worse from there.<\/p>\n<p>Above is a clip of the musical\u2019s title track, \u201cThe Apple,\u201d in which the entire cast is transported to Hell and the classic forbidden fruit is dangled before our unsuspecting heroes. \u201cJuju Apple \/ Voodoo Apple,\u201d sings a mildly hunky shirtless guy. \u201cTake a little bite \/ Spend a splendid night \/ In our garden of delights.\u201d 1994, man\u2014it was <em>wild<\/em>!<\/p>\n<p>If Menahem Golan is, as I write, in transit to some kind of afterlife, I hope it\u2019s infinitely more pleasant than the one depicted in <em>The Apple<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Menahem Golan, the B-Movie auteur, is dead at eighty-five, the Times reports. In the course of his prolific career, Golan\u2014who directed more than forty films and produced more than two hundred\u2014worked with Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Vanessa Redgrave; though he had a hand in several distinguished productions, he and his cohort trafficked [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[14936,14935,14934,14937,8705,14932,5335,11989,14933],"class_list":["post-75229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-memoriam","tag-14936","tag-14935","tag-b-movies","tag-bad-movies","tag-films","tag-menahem-golan","tag-musicals","tag-obituaries","tag-the-apple"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Taste It! by Dan Piepenbring<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 11, 2014 \u2013 Menahem Golan, the B-Movie auteur, is dead at eighty-five, the Times reports. 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