Apple and her two co-workers are the Mean Girls of the mall, which rather tracks considering scenes from Mean Girls were also shot at the real-life Sherway Gardens mall (in Toronto, not Texas). She jealously guards their place at the top of the hierarchy, but she allows Pumpkin to make the unprecedented social climb from pretzel store to their “Free Eden” boutique. Evidently, her name is just sufficiently fruit-like to qualify.
Awkwardly, Cherry resents Pumpkin joining the Free Eden sales staff, because it jeopardizes her status as Apple’s favorite. Fig is more down-to-earth than the infantilized Cherry. She even has a healthy relationship with her secret boyfriend. However, all three store clerks share a dark secret regarding Pickle, Pumpkin’s predecessor, who roams the mall in a mentally agitated state. Supposedly, one of Apple’s spells accidentally backfired on Pickle, but Pumpkin suspects it was more intentional. In fact, Pumpkin has further suspicions regarding Apple and her coven. That is why she started working in the mall in the first place.
Like Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is, Forbidden Fruits started life as a stage drama, Lily Houghton’s awkwardly titled Of the Woman Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die, but Alloway and the playwright pumped up the genre elements when adapting it for the screen. Most of the film has a weird “what am I watching vibe,” but that makes it memorable, in a good way. It is not exactly horror, at least not really, but there is certainly a macabre undertone and eventually a good deal of blood.
Arguably, it is a rather incisive satire of Wiccan New Age feminist ideology, in which the rhetoric of self-empowerment becomes a spell to smite thine enemies. Whether intentional or not, Apple’s contempt for traditional family and general bourgeoisie striving soon reveals its horrifying true face.
Forbidden Fruits is an eccentric yet sinister little film that works far more successfully than you might expect. Frankly, it probably documents a dying retail experience, but at least Alloway and company completed it just in the nick of time. It is too bad, because malls gave Gen X’ers early experience with responsibility and professionalism, which obviously isn’t reflected by the film’s characters. Recommended for its over-the-top insanity, Forbidden Fruits starts streaming tomorrow (6/26) on Shudder.
