Club Dread Review


Movie: Club Dread
By: DVH
Date: April 3, 2011

Welcome to Pleasure Island

Club Dread is a movie that can be best described as Scream meets American Pie. Made by the comedy group Broken Lizard, here's a hilarious slasher movie that takes place on Coconut Pete's Pleasure Island!

Okay, first things first

Club Dread is not a horror movie. It’s a comedy horror. It takes place on Pleasure Island, a resort that provides an unlimited amount of fun, drinks, sex and drugs and is owned by Coconut Pete, a has-been rockstar. When dead bodies start to turn up, the Pleasure Island staff try to save their lives and their search to catch and stop the killer begins.

Introduction

After an introduction scene of what’s going on at the island the movie starts with the arrival of Lars, a substitute masseur (Kevin Heffernan) and the Pleasure Island staff is introduced, consisting of Jenny, aerobics instructor (Brittany Daniel), Juan , watersports instructor and dive master (Steve Lemme), Putman the tennis instructor (Jay Chandrasekhar), Dave, DJ and drug dealer (Paul Soter), Sam, the fun police (Erik Stolhanske) and resort owner Coconut Pete, who also is a washed-up rockstar (Bill Paxton). One by one, characters of the staff are murdered and since there’s no way off the island, they have to fight back to try to stay alive.

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Who?

Broken Lizard, the comedy group who wrote and star in the movie (and who also made the comedy movies Puddle Cruiser, Super Troopers, Beerfest and most recently The Slammin’ Salmon), use a certain sense of humour, that you either love or hate. Not unimportant, the demograph you’re in usually does play a pretty big factor in whether you like this movie or not (or all of Broken Lizard’s movies in general). The targeted audience for this movie are mainly high school kids and young adults. Or people who like (teen)horror flicks such as Scream and I know what you did last summer or comedies in the style of American Pie kind of movies.

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Funny gore

As mentioned before, Club Dread is definitely not a real horror movie. It has about a dozen of kills, some scares, a few scenes of slight gore and enough moments of suspense and scary music, but it’s still even more of a comedy than a horror movie. Usually the kills and scenes where a bit of gore is used are funny, most of the characters are pretty weird and humoristic and all the situations, events, conversations and jokes in this movie are funny or hilarious. There even is a live action game of Pac Man going on during a scene in the movie!

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The best thing

The best thing about Club Dread is that the actors really seemed to be having a blast while making this movie, which works infectious to the viewers and the movie is just a lot of plain fun. But not all is great here, far from it. The acting isn’t at a high level, none of the Broken Lizard actors (or supporting actors) will ever get an Oscar for their performance. It also is a very low-budget movie, which becomes very obvious at times. Some effects are so bad or so fake that they turn out hilarious and have to be seen to be believed. But the “B-movie” feeling that surrounds Club Dread definitely has a charm.

Conclusion

So, is Club Dread a good movie? No, not so much. Is it a fun movie? Hell yeah! At least that’s what I think. This movie usually got pretty poor ratings, but I honestly think it is a bit underrated. Some people say I’m easily entertained for loving this one so much, but I would definitely recommend checking it out.


4/5




Movie

Club Dread

Title

Club Dread

Director

Jay Chandrasekhar

Country

USA

Year

2004

Cast

Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Brittany Daniel, Bill Paxton