Caged Terror (Golden Apples of the Sun) (1973)

Very well executed

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

This is a film of many parts. Unfortunately, most of those parts don't seem to fit together very well, and some of them are distinctly out of place. Written, produced, and directed by Barrie McLean and Kristen Weingartner, Golden Apples of the Sun (or, as it is more commonly known, Caged Terror) plays like a piece of improvisational theatre shot in the backwoods of Quebec. Elizabeth Suzuki and Peter Harkness star as Jan and Richard, a pair of big city kids who decide to get back to nature by going for a hike in the woods. Here they encounter some impressive nature photography courtesy Roger Moride, best known for shooting that Neil Sedaka slasher flick, Playgirl Killer. The countryside looks beautiful, but Suzuki and Harkness are strictly amateur hour, and things really get a bit awkward when Galt McDermott's jazzy score kicks in (as performed by Bernard 'Pretty' Purdie and his band). It's a fine score, but makes no sense in this setting. Meanwhile, loners Jarvis and The Troubadour (Derek Lamb and Leon Morenzie) are also wandering the woods with their guitars and ponchos, but our four protagonists don't meet up until long after Suzuki and Harkness engage in a little softcore saturnalia and then discover an abandoned house deep in the woods. In fact, the first hour of the film is terribly, terribly earnest, with all sorts of cod philosophy offered as deep thoughts by Jan and Richard. Things then take a turn for the exploitative after Richard decides to take a crap, at which point Jarvis and The Troubadour show up and start flashing back to their time in 'Nam. After an unfortunate misunderstanding involving a gun, the film reaches its climax with violence-prone Richard being locked inside a big bird cage, though not the kind Roger Corman was familiar with. This baffling film defies categorization and criticism: I could just as easily give it a 2 as an 8, so I'm going to take the coward's way out and give it a 5. I can safely claim that there's no other film quite like Golden Apples of the Sun, but the closest I can get is Garson Kanin's extremely underrated post-Vietnam War drama The Visitors.

I can only echo what everybody else here has already said, in that this is one of the most pointless releases ever to see the inside of the cinema. We have a couple of hippies who obviously love each other very much, since they seem to spend every waking hour together talking gobble-de-gook ( about life and the trees, man!), catching fish and prancing about the countryside naked. This goes on for the first hour of the movie, with no respite whatsoever. How on earth did they manage to get funding for such a worthless premise? This is like seeing somebody's boring camcorder holiday videos.. only this time you have to pay for the privilege. Then we get lots of tinkly folk music complete with stock footage of the great outdoors, as the audience slowly loses the will to live.For those who can last the pace (HOW?!) we finally have a bit of excitement in the final reel as the bloke is tied up in the chicken coop(Yipe!) by a couple of hoodlums intent on kidnapping his girl. Can he get free and rescue her? Or will he be killed by their dreadful guitar-strumming first? Quite frankly, who gives a monkey's. Next up: The director, 30 years on, tries to escape the clutches of an angry patron who wants to take out 80 minutes of wasted time on his head. Now THAT would be a sequel worth seeing.. 0/10

Watching paint dry is more compelling and twice as engaging. An academy award should be given to anyone who can sit through this snooze fest with out yawning. If Seinfeld was a television sitcom about nothing, then this was the movie about nothing. Unlike Seinfeld however this film did not have great writing and acting to make it work. Within the first five minutes I had the feeling that I was watching a movie made by four people with nothing else to do one afternoon. There is no plot! The viewer is left to guess what the plot was so as to justify the time wasted in watching. The acting is bad; no it would have to improve to be bad. Elizabeth Suzuki gets naked but even that was ruined by poor filming. I would recommend this film be required viewing for film students. It would prove that no matter how bad your student projects suck, there is always something worse that went straight to video.

This film turned up on local TV here in South Africa recently and I thought that I'd warn even those who enjoy watching B grade bad movies (which I do)that this is not even amusing. The plot concerns a couple visiting a house in the country. Some strangers appear and .... The problem is that most of the film, obviously shot in the early seventies, consists of extreme wide shots of people walking, in real time and awfully slowly, from A to B. This makes the film tedious in the extreme and the expected blood and gore payoff just never happens. I am really curious - how many people have actually watched this from beginning to end?