YMMV / Apaches

• Accidental Aesop: While the obvious one is for children to be careful, there’s an additional one for parents: watch your kids and don’t let them run buckwild through somewhere potentially unsafe.
• Common Knowledge: It's usually said that the pesticide that killed Sharon was weed killer composed mainly of paraquat. In the film itself, it's never specified to be such, only described as a poison meant to kill the rats.
• Cult Classic: Despite all the film's problems, it still traumatized an entire generation of children from the late 70's through the 80's. It also currently holds a rating of 7.3/10 on IMDb.
• Fridge Horror: Poor Michael's more than likely been severely traumatised by the time all of the events depicted in the film were over, what with witnessing his entire friend group (bar Sharon, and even then he definitely would've heard about her painful demise) die horribly all because they weren't paying attention to their surroundings.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: This film was also shown in American, Canadian, and Australian schools in rural areas, presumably because all kids in that type of environment would benefit from the film's lesson.
• He Really Can Act: Sharon Smart, who plays Sharon, was only a child during filming, and hasn't acted in anything before or since this film. Despite this, she delivered an absolutely heartstopping performance during her death scene, where she screams so horrifically, you'd swear the actress was actually being murdered. Some adult actors have trouble with horror screams, but this little girl pulled it off with flying colours.
• Narm: After a while, the blank expression on Danny's face whenever he sees one of his friends die becomes more funny than sad or creepy as it was probably intended.
• Nausea Fuel: Tom ends up drowning in a slurry pit, which is basically a pit filled with liquefied cow shit. It's hard to think of a more embarrassing or disgusting way to go.
• Signature Scene: Sharon's death from pesticide poisoning is often the most talked about in the comment sections, due to managing to be the hands-down most horrifying scene in the entire film despite nothing gruesome being shown.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • Building Sites Bite is pretty much Apaches transplanted into an urban setting. Like Apaches, it ends with a list of names of children killed in real-life accidents within the previous year.
  • Never Rest is essentially Apaches for The '90s, only slightly less traumatising.
• Values Dissonance: Back in the 70's, stuff like "Cowboys and Indians" were rather popular children's games. These days, European children dressing as and playing Native Americans and painting them as "savage" is considered culturally insensitive and would not go over well today.

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