The twisted minds behind “Super Troopers”, Broken Lizard, are back with a brand new film “Club Dread”. The story such as it is, centers around a group of tourists who travel to a tropical resort that is owned by a Tropical singer Coconut Pete (Bill Paxton), who uses the resort as a way to stay in the spotlight since his music has become largely nostalgic.
Before long, the good times are interrupted as the bodies of staff members start to pile up along with instructions not to alert the guests and to go about life as usual. Staff members failing to follow the instructions are promised to end up dead by the mysterious killer.
With all forms of communication and escape removed by the killer, the staff must resort to waiting until the next boat of guests arrives to evacuate them. The main problem with this plan is that the killer is still out there and is likely one of the staff members themselves.
Sadly this film loses all interest beyond the premise as the jokes fall flat and I quickly lost all interest in the film. The “Scary Movie” series did a far-superior job of spoofing horror by taking things to bizarre and outrageous lengths in order to get a laugh. What “Dread” does is try to play it out as a traditional horror film with laughs and it fails badly. Copious amounts of blood and gore are shown but they do not generate laughs at all as that clearly seems to be the intent.
The Broken Lizard group seems very restrained in their parts and never seems to get any momentum behind their performances leaving the film a disjointed effort. I had wanted to like this film but there was so little to like in it that I decided to restrain my review and simple state that this film is absolutely dreadful and should be avoided at all costs.
1 star out of 5
