15. WORKPLACE WHOOPSIE: O.S.H.A. inspectors are gonna need a whole case of red tape for this day.
Even if there aren’t as many anymore, the shopping mall is the ultimate cathedral of American consumer dread. Meredith Alloway’s debut feature Forbidden Fruits—co-written by Lily Houghton and produced by Diablo Cody—pays its respects to those who keep coming back and spending. Like the B in B and S About Movies, my wife Becca.
Apple (Lili Reinhart), Cherry (Victoria Pedretti) and Fig (Alexandra Shipp) are three razor-sharp, ultra-glamorous retail vixens running a high-end boutique called Free Eden inside a Dallas, Texas mall. They don’t just sell clothes; they fleece unsuspecting shoppers out of thousands of dollars while wearing matching charm bracelets and maintaining an elitist, mean-girl wall of hostility toward the rest of the retail peonage.
That all changes when Pumpkin (Lola Tung)—a wide-eyed girl working the soft pretzel counter in the food court—comes looking for a promotion. Despite their total disgust for anyone from Sister Salt, the Free Eden trio brings Pumpkin into the fold.
But once the security grilles roll down and the mall lights go dim, the basement of Free Eden turns into an altar.
Their rituals involve spiking fruit juice with human blood, banning boyfriends under threat of hexes and confessing their darkest sins directly to the ghostly spirit of Marilyn Monroe. Pumpkin gets spiked, initiated and abandoned locked inside the store overnight—only to emerge the next morning strutting like a runway queen, fully transformed into a coven sister.
But things aren’t all that great for our witches.
We learn that Apple is living out of her car and may have killed her abusive dad; Fig is sneaking around — the girls aren’t allowed to date — with a guy named Norman while trying to escape into grad school; and Cherry is secretly hooking up with male mall employees behind Apple’s back. Oh, and Pumpkin’s predecessor—a poor girl named Pickle (Emma Chamberlain)—was institutionalized after Apple tricked the coven into hexing her boyfriend. When Pickle shows up wandering the mall corridors like a lost soul and leaps to her death off the second-story mezzanine right in front of Pumpkin, the entire group spirals into absolute paranoia.
And that’s when Alloway hits the gas pedal for a grand finale locked inside the mall during a tornado warning. Cleavers tear into men, an escalator does what I always feared it could to human flesh, and there’s a glass skylight dropping onto someone in a way that would make Dario proud. And there’s still a twist to come.
Forbidden Fruits is a mall slasher that I’d put up there with Slaxx, but not Chopping Mall. Somewhere around Phantom of the Mall. But not as good as Elves.
