Disclaimer: Spoilers for the story of the film are in this review.
Horror and comedy have a long history together, producing classics like “Young Frankenstein” and “Shaun of the Dead.” But for every classic, there’s a film like “Club Dread”.
Also known as “Broken Lizard’s Club Dread”, the 2005 slasher comedy was created by the eponymous Broken Lizard comedy troupe, best known for the cult comedy hit “Super Troopers”. If you watched a lot of comedy central around the late aughts, then you probably saw that movie and their other flicks a few times.
Coincidentally, “Club Dread” is usually left out of those marathons, which for a series of movies that range from “kinda funny, but aged poorly” to “wait, that was a real movie” that’s generally not a good sign.
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The movie takes place at an island resort off the coast of Costa Rica run by Jimmy Buffet pastiche Coconut Pete, a washed out folk singer played by Bill Paxton. From the jump, we watch a trio of resort staff get killed by a masked figure.
After two more killings, the murderer leaves a message for the remaining staff, indicating they’re his targets and that he’ll start killing again if they don’t focus on doing their jobs. With the number of suspects growing shorter by the day, it doesn’t take long for people to start pointing fingers.
The biggest problem the movie has is that it doesn’t have a real identity. It has the hallmarks of bro-dude stoner movies of the time, mixed with moments of absurdism, but never managing to commit to either.
Absurdism is probably the direction this movie should have gone in. A lot of the 2000s frat comedy hasn’t aged well, and even if it had, there are much funnier examples of it than “Club Dread”. The few parts of the movie that actually earn a chuckle, is when it becomes overly silly.
An example is when the newly hired masseur Lars, played by Kevin Heffernan, has to get under a bed to hide from the killer. The heavy-set Lars uses a Buddhist chant to thin himself out to hide underneath.
It’s certainly silly and one of the more memorable gags in the film, which otherwise relies a lot on very stale sex and drug jokes.
The performances are also a mixed bag. Heffernan and female lead Brittany Daniels do a decent enough job of being likable, at least relative to the other characters, but the movie desperately needed more Paxton in it.
On the other hand, the character of Pullman, played by director Jay Chandrasekhar, is just bizarrely unfunny. His main character traits are creeping on Daniels’ character and having a really bad English accent.
The bad accents extend to Juan, played by Steve Lemme, who, if the name didn’t already give it away, has a very stereotypical Latino accent. Combine this with him also being the stereotypical sex maniac and you have the worst parts of early 2000s comedy in one character.
Length is also a bit of an issue, clocking in at around an hour and 36 minutes before you hit the credits. A good fifteen minutes could have been cut along with a character or two, and the movie wouldn’t have suffered.
On top of everything else, “Club Dread” is also just not a particularly good satire on horror films. A lot of its riffs on genre tropes are very surface level and have been done better by films before and since.
That’s not to say the film is all bad. The ending sequence features some genuinely funny bits, with killer Sam, played by Erik Stolhanske, initially blaming his killing spree on a fellow staffer bogarting him on the local grass. The way they kill him off is also legitimately one of the more interesting ways I’ve seen a slasher movie killed off.
“Club Dread” probably doesn’t deserve the reputation it has of being an ultra-bad movie, but it’s certainly not a very good one either. With so many classic horror comedies out there to watch, it’s borderline impossible to recommend watching this movie instead of something like “BeetleJuice”.
