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Overall Rating
  Awesome: 7.59%
Worth A Look: 20.25%
Average: 20.25%
Pretty Bad: 35.44%
Total Crap: 16.46%
6 reviews, 43 user ratings
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| Club Dread |
by Scott Weinberg
"Paxton? Horror Spoof? Bare Boobs? Yep, too good to be true."

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What sounded like a surefire recipe for Weinberg Love (a goofball horror spoof with the 'Super Troopers' guys AND Bill Paxton) ends up a limp, obvious and sadly flaccid farce - by a collection of subversive comedians who really should have known better.Though advertised, ineffectively, as some sort of Horror Movie spoof, the truth is that the Broken Lizard's second feature is actually more of a broad comedy/mystery thing, more like Jonathan Lynn's Clue (though not nearly as manic) than the rapid-fire barrage of silliness that was the original Scary Movie. Are we so entirely bereft of clever ideas that we're now bankrolling comedy versions of the sequel to I Know What You Did Last Summer?
Or perhaps the Lizard fellas took their profits from Super Troopers on a six-month tropical vacation, deciding near the tail-end of their free time to order in a few cameras and a handful of actors because, hey, why not film a movie while we're on vacation? We're comedians! We can just make it up as we go! My agent's kids have play-dates with Bill Paxton's kids; let's send him a plane ticket as see if he shows up!
Please don't think I'm being unkind just for the sake of it, because I went into Club Dread fairly certain that it was right up my alley; I adore slasher flicks, effective slapstick is a favorite side dish of mine, the "Troopers" guys had filled me with a sense of goofball good will, and let's be fair: any modern-day movie freak worth his salt simply loves Bill Paxton. It's almost impossible not to.
So as Club Dread unspooled, and the "killer loose on a sex-laden tropical island" schtick kicked into second gear, I found myself annoyed that the laughs were so few and far between. Oh, you can SEE where the chuckles are supposed to go: loud and exasperated vulgarities are punctuated by long airy spaces, because this is where the audiences' laughter is meant to appear. And when the laughter doesn't show, the movie starts to feel a little...uncomfortable.
Schizophrenic to the core, Club Dread begins as a straight-on comedy, yet feels beholden to the Horror Fans, and thus we get a collection of gory dispatches in the flick's final reel. Filmmakers considerably more talented that Lizard director Jay Chandrasekhar have tried to find the humor in a slasher flick setting. None have really succeeded. Despite a somewhat worthwhile collection of amiable chuckles (and two or three truly amusing sequences that work only because of shock value), Club Dread is a limp and lethargic affair. And that's the kiss of death for a slob comedy. The flick has no forward momentum, no real cohesion between its myriad caricatures/victims, and (most importantly) a distressingly low batting average where the yuks are concerned.It's clear to me that the Broken Lizard guys are very funny chaps. Filmmakers they are not. Perhaps for their next go-round they could hire a director familiar with their sort of material. After the success of Gimmick Comedies like "The Brady Bunch Movie" and "Private Parts", one suspects that director Betty Thomas could rein these guys in, trim off the fat, and help the crew to create something truly hilarious. 'Club Dread' feels like a step back from 'Troopers', and one would hate to see the Lizards step back much further.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=8774&reviewer=128 originally posted: 03/04/04 07:36:06
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This film is available for download or online viewing at CinemaNow.com For more in the CinemaNow.com series, click here.
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USA 27-Feb-2004 (R) DVD: 28-Sep-2004
UK N/A (15)
Australia 24-Jun-2004
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