YMMV / April Fools' Day

• Angst? What Angst?: Characters such as Nikki, Chaz, Kit, Rob and Hal spent a whole day thinking their friend was trying to murder them, and found convincing looking corpses of their other friends. Kit and Rob especially get chased around the house, thinking Muffy's Evil Twin is about to kill them. Once it's revealed as a prank, Kit yells at Muffy once but appears to be fine after a few minutes. Nikki in particular is laughing and joking when The Reveal happens - with no ill will towards being made to think she was trapped in a well with three bodies. This does make a little more sense with the original ending, where they would attempt to prank Muffy back in revenge, but in the final film, they just get back at Muffy by pouring champagne on her during the party.
• Broken Base: The canon ending or the alternate one. Some fans would have preferred an actual murder to happen in the end while others are fine with the joke ending where Everybody Lives.
• Common Knowledge: The film is often lumped in with the numerous 80s slashers that came in the wake of Halloween (1978), ignoring that it's more of an Affectionate Parody of the genre and the cast and crew were deliberately out to subvert a lot of the usual tropes of the day (Sex Signals Death, Final Girl, Developing Doomed Characters etc.), not to mention the reveal at the end that all of the killings are pranks and that in reality, all of the character survive. This wasn't helped by Paramount marketing it as a straight slasher, resulting in audiences expecting it as such.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Nikki finding three bodies in the well is terrifying. The next scene where Muffy offers her water - only for Nikki to jump away (assuming it's from the well) is bound to make one chuckle.
• Cult Classic: While it didn't make much headway at the Box Office, it has amassed quite the fan base as years have gone by.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Nikki, Chaz, and Arch are thre three most popular characters:
  • Nikki her funny lines and shameless Really Gets Around nature. The fact that she's quite beautiful helps too.
  • Arch because it's Biff (which he had just filmed before this), his entertaining lines, and his funny-but-harmless comic relief antics.
  • Chaz, like Arch and Nikki, for being a primary source of comic relief. Being Nikki's boyfriend and Arch's best friend helps a lot too.
• Estrogen Brigade: Girls love Rod and his scene wearing just his briefs, as well as appearing in a speedo later.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Skip is blamed for a boating accident that leaves a ferryman disfigured. His actor Griffin O'Neal would be involved in a boating accident the next year, which resulted in the death of Francis Ford Coppola's son Gian-Carlo.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Deborah Goodrich, who plays Nikki, was noted by fans to have a distinct resemblance to Sarah Michelle Gellar. And Muffy's twin sister is named Buffy. Buffy was also created to subvert the trope of the blonde victim in horror movies, and the Final Girl of this film is blonde. And as no one dies, this also subverts that in a different way.
• Ho Yay:
  • Chaz and Arch at times seem closer than any of the women they're trying to get with. You almost wonder why they don't just get with each other instead.
  • Nan also gushes about how good Muffy was in drama society the way a crush would, and kisses her on the cheek after pranking her at the end.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Critics at the time who didn't care for the movie said that Deborah Foreman's performance was the saving grace.
• Magnificent Bitch: Muffy St. John is a young entrepreneur with a penchant for pranks. Inheriting a mansion, Muffy decides to turn it into a country hotel where the guests would be involved in a simulated murder mystery, Ten Little Murder Victims-style. Needing a test run for the booby-trapped mansion, Muffy invites her cousin Skip and their college friends to the mansion, places items from each person's past in their rooms to unnerve them, cuts off contact to the mainland, and pretends to "murder" each of them one-by-one using the persona of a fake Evil Twin named Buffy. When the secret is found out, Muffy apologizes for the personal taunts and tricking the survivors into thinking their friends were dead, and appears all set to make her dream a reality.
• Nausea Fuel: What happens to Chaz. Having your penis cut off is horrible to think about. Even if it didn't really happen.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • With The Reveal Muffy effectively tricked her friends into thinking she had died, that her sister was trying to kill them and they'd witnessed horrors like Buck's injury. One mild apology and they're immediately okay with it. This does make sense when you consider the planned ending that had the friends trying to prank Muffy in revenge and the last bit suggesting Sanity Slippage (and therefore this would be foreshadowing that she wasn't the sanest individual). It's entirely up to the viewer whether Nan's little prank at the end is fitting comeuppance or not.
  • What's more is that Muffy using this as a test run for turning the house into a murder mystery roleplay event had no reason to make her friends think it was real - she outright says her guests will know what they're getting into in the future. So it just seems needlessly cruel to play such an elaborate joke on them.
• Vindicated by Cable: The movie didn't do that well when it was released but it enjoyed plenty of reruns on cable (due to the violence being only implied rather than shown). It picked up a cult following as a result.