Club Dread (**)
review by Jon Waterman

Coconut Pete’s resort is a place where college kids can come and party to the extreme. The staff is instructed to sleep with the guests to make their visit more enjoyable. They even have fun police on duty. It’s a hedonistic island with no escape, so you might as well enjoy the festivities. Enjoyment becomes more difficult, because there’s a killer on the loose. One by one, the masked serial killer is picking off the nubile youth. Can he be stopped? Will we laugh as they try?

Comedy troupe Broken Lizard hopes you will laugh. Aside from the opening half hour or so, the jokes get killed pretty steadily. The film starts off with the first deaths. A guy and two girls that escape to do some drugs and have a three way in the jungle. We are treated to a bunch of funny jokes and unusually creative insults (which can’t be repeated here) before the plot even gets going. However, later on, after the scene with the maze, all of the intelligent yet vulgar humor dies down. They get too caught up with the story and don’t focus enough on keeping the oddball comedy feel to it.

Although the laughs pretty much stop after thirty minutes, the parody is consistently good throughout. Not great, but good. Unlike a movie such as “Freddy Vs. Jason” where the movie may or may not be making fun of itself, “Club Dread” is definitely satirizing the horror genre. In fact, sometimes it does a better job with it than the “real” scary movies. You may jump a couple times. And I was honestly surprised when I found out who the killer was. I expected something more quirky or unbelievable from this group. The ending was overdoing it and everyone could tell where it was going. Other than that, the film did a good job of sticking with the conventions and precedents set while at the same time exploiting them.

The acting of course is pretty bad, but part of that is on purpose. Occasionally the comic timing is off, but it’s still more effective than a lot of comedies in that respect. All in all, though, it just doesn’t have the same rapid-fire feel that “Super Troopers” has. The jokes don’t come very quick and they get lost near the end. The story is there, but not enough was done creatively to make it gut-bustingly funny. We know they’re capable of it, which makes the film more disappointing. I’m sure there are going to plenty of people that disagree with me on this, but I just wasn’t feeling it.

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