April’s Shower

Another day, another zany yet lazy comedy best left forgotten.

April’s Shower takes place at a wedding shower for a high maintenance woman named April. The shower is run and catered for by April’s maid of honour, Alex. In addition to April and Alex, a wacky cast of characters attend. This includes Alex’s gay best friend, her stoner brother, an obsessive Scottish man, a muscular pizza guy and April’s homophobic mother. What follows is your standard zany ensemble comedy. Everyone has a tiny plot line and a maximum of three personality traits. The main plot is between Alex and April. Alex reveals that she and April were together for five years before April’s engagement. Feelings still linger between the women so the question becomes whether April can make the leap and commit to having an open, queer relationship with Alex.

This is a difficult film for me to review because all of my thoughts about it feel repetitive. I’ve seen movies like April’s Shower before and this iteration doesn’t offer much that’s new. It’s a bunch of stock characters, jokes and scenarios. The film also lacks any ability to follow through. So instead of anyone outside of Alex and April resolving their secondary conflict, the film just keeps adding new characters and conflicts right until the end. You’d think that would help with pacing but it does the opposite. Without anyone seeming to move towards any sort of resolution, the film felt endless.

April’s Shower is a lazy movie which means its depictions of gay people aren’t great. This movie is mildly homophobic even though I’m pretty sure the people behind the scenes were generally LGBTQ* themselves. But all the film does is take standard, heterosexual characters and plots and chuck a thin veneer of homosexuality over them. Because there’s no depth in these portrayals, the queer aspect gets caught up in the laziness. While the film clearly has no ill-will toward gay people and has gay sensibilities, that doesn’t stop the fact that their reliance on stock characters extends to effeminate gay best friends and sexually voracious bisexuals who can’t commit.

The film is mostly made up of nobody actors who I’ve never seen before. The exception is Frank Grillo. Grillo is most known these days as being a B-level fighting and muscle man in Hollywood. In April’s Shower, he’s a muscular pizza delivery guy who likes architecture. His character almost immediately gets hit on by the openly gay character so I was wondering/hoping if the film would end with said character bagging this muscular straight guy. I’d respect Frank Grillo more as an actor for being willing to kiss a dude. Nope! It’s so much worse. Instead, his character gets kissed by a lesbian on a whim. This kiss is apparently so good that they then both profess their love for each other and end the movie as a couple. This is the opposite of what I wanted!

April’s Shower has little going for it. It’s a film full of stock characters and recycled jokes. Almost every character has a plot line related to finding true love. Yet some of the stories end with lesbians turning straight, stalkers getting everything they ever obsessed over and a lesbian proposal between two people who seem inherently unsuitable. This movie doesn’t know what the words love means. It also doesn’t have the firmest grasp on what the word comedy means.

Overall rating: 3.7/10

Other WLW films in similar genres