Audience members were handed free vinyl records of the soundtrack as they entered. By the fillm's end, they were throwing them at the screen.

THE APPLE is Menahem Golan's magnum opus - a $10 million biblical-allegorical disco-rock musical set in the dystopian future of 1994, in which a satanic music corporation called Boogalow International Music controls the world through a mandatory daily exercise routine, and two young Canadian singers must resist temptation, survive glitter-drenched debauchery, and ultimately be rescued by a hippie God descending from the sky in a Rolls-Royce. This is the actual film.

The story started as a planned Hebrew stage musical. Golan got involved, moved production to West Berlin for subsidies, and kept coming back with more money. What began as a $4 million project eventually cost $10 million.

The lead actress's singing was so inadequate she was dubbed by a professional vocalist from Los Angeles, which nobody seems to have noticed at the time because the songs are extraordinary in their own right - which is to say, extraordinarily something.

When the premiere at the 1980 Montreal World Film Festival ended in audience revolt, Golan went back to his hotel and was preparing to jump from the balcony, convinced the public simply hadn't understood. He may have had a point.

There is no other film like The Apple. There cannot be.