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When someone doubles your pleasure, you’d certainly hope that they’d also double your fun – and fun certainly seems to be on the cards once you listen to the premise of Forbidden Fruits. Offering a two for one sale on campy comedy, the feature debut of Meredith Alloway merges the sassy humour of Mean Girls with the witchy teen angst of The Craft as we are introduced to an elitist group of glamorous young women who hold the mall where they work in their thrall.
However, if you’re going to take cues from one of the most influential coming of age comedies of all time and a cult teen horror/thriller that predated Scream (throw in a little bit of Heathers too while you’re at it), you’d better make sure that you’re fully stocked with stylish needle drops and biting satire to spare. However, maybe I’m just not on the right wavelength here, but rather than finding a great deal on a satire of women’s empowerment, I just found Forbidden Fruits a bargin basement ripoff…
Working out of the Free Eden clothing store of a Texan mall, we find that the fruit-named trio of Apple, Fig and Cherry hold sizable social sway over the staff of other stores. With the ditzy Cherry and the loyal Fig flanking her, Apple maintains a near dictatorship level of control over the store despite not actually being the manager (that would be the mysterious Sharon), but while she claims that it’s all in aid of women supporting women, they tend to look down on everyone else – especially those who work in the food court.
Enter Pumpkin, a new starter at the nearby pretzel stand, who manages to circumvent their distain of food workers by the fact that her fruit-based name would complete a quartet and soon she’s being groomed to work in Free Eden with her new friends. However, it doesn’t take long to see that beneath their stylish, cultivated surface, there’s some dark things going on with these forbidden fruits. Apple proves to be incredibly controlling and domineering, issuing such rules like no one fucks on a Wednesday, or you can only text boys with emojis. This influence especially covers the rather addictive personality of Cherry, whom she micromanages to remain sober, but unbeknownst to Apple, both Cherry (voracious secual appetite) and Fig (secret boyfriend) have been tugging at her influence.
Why would any of this matter to Pumpkin? Because she also has some sort of ulterior motive for becoming part of this clique and it involves planting cameras in the store and digging into the past of her fellow fruits. What is the darker side of this store based coven and what did it do to an insane former member named Pickle? What’s more, why is Pumpkin so intrigued by the rumours that Apple murdered her own father? As the secrets and lies unravel, we’ll find these fruits are rotten to the core.
While I’ll freely admit that there’s more than a few worthy bargains to be found in Meredith Alloway’s bitchy, girl boss comedy, I found, for the most part, that I didn’t buy what she’s selling. Maybe I just didn’t pick up on some of the themes, or maybe I thought the Scream Queens/Ryan Murphy levels of camp snark just didn’t vibe with me, but for a witch-based comedy that took repeated jabs at the hypocrisy of cliques, I just didn’t find it that funny. That doesnt mean that Alloway hasn’t got a bunch of fertile ideas to play with – the switch from the usual hierarchy of a high school setting to the social structure of a mall is a neat twist that fits well and it also slots in well with other mall-based horrors (Dawn Of The Dead, Chopping Mall) and retail-centric, teen flicks (Mallrats, Empire Records). Additionally, Forbidden Fruits also comes fully stocked with a quartet of central performances that qualify as pretty strong. Lili Reinhart may not be as memorable as Rachel McAdams as the tip of the controlling pyramid, but as various truths emerge and her hold begins to falter, she gets a few more notes to play with than just icy bitch. Also, solid support is also delivered by Alexandra Shipp secretly rebellious Fig, who struggles with a budding new relationship under Apple’s draconian laws, and Lola Tung’s newbie who hopes to Nancy Drew her way to the bottom of a witchy conspiracy. However, top marks go to Victoria Pedretti, who after significantly dark turns in the likes of The Haunting Of Hill House and You, gets to have a complete airhead blowout thanks to some outlandish, cowgirl based fashions and a libido that runs harder than a V8 flathead engine.
However, when you hear that a movie is merging the likes of both The Craft and Mean Girls, you’d expect it to be both funnier and contain a fair bit more witchcraft than it actually does, and despite a surprisingly bloody climax that owes a fair due to Final Destination (that escalator demise looks suspiciously familiar), I was fishing for a laugh that was more than a muted chuckle. While the witchcraft angle seems little more than an afterthought at times, Alloway hurls all manner of quirky details our way to push the camp factor off the scales. The girls have to give confessional to their idol, Marilyn Monroe, whenever they break any of the rules, they drink their potions out of an ornate boot and they charge customers an ungodly amount of money for rudimentary fashion advice, but not a lot of it is actually funny – certainly not in a razor sharp Tina Fey way, anyway.
Even more off-putting is the fact that despite the central mystery that Pumpkin is trying to solve, the film’s pace is strangely leaden despite blatantly trying to move with youthful vigour. But once we get to the meat of things, it’s actually tough to figure out who the film is actually hoping we’ll root for and a strangely down-beat ending confuses matters even more. Are we behind Pumpkin and her quest for truth? Were we supposed to be ironically be cheering for Apple all along? The messy ending really doesn’t seem to have much of a clue, especially when the showdown in a fountain offers a surprise twist that’s just more odd and confusing than outright shocking. I mean, we all love a little drama, right? But girl, pump the brakes, it’s only retail, yeah?
While never really achieving the potential of the two films it’s trying to ape, there’s also a feeling that Forbidden Fruits is so desperately trying so hard to be a cult classic right out of the gate, it actually forgets that you still have to give a shit about the actual story rather than just hurling quirks at the screen (the recent Lisa Frankenstein had some similar issues).
While Forbidden Fruits it utimately wasn’t my cup of enchanted tea (strange when you consider I enjoyed the films that inspired it), I always kind of hope that a movie that is so obviously desperate for a cult following actually gets it. However, a lack of strong laughs and a general unfocused nature means that I’ll be putting these fruits back in the bowl for someone else to enjoy.
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