When Super Troopers opened in the middle of February of 2002, America was still reeling from the aftermath of 9/11 and the impending threat of a war was looming. No one had anticipated that an obscure comedy troupe that had formed at Colgate University in the late 1980s was going to give us the laughs we desperately needed. The movie featuring a cast of unknowns and character actors became a modest sleeper hit grossing $23 million worldwide against a mere fraction of that budget.
But mostly it found its audience among young people, college students and stoners on home video who could watch the movie repeatedly and almost repeat the dialogue verbatim. So, what were they going to do for a follow-up? The result is Broken Lizard’s Club Dread, a comedy horror, that functions as kind of a spoof of slasher movies. I groaned a little when I saw this, mainly because the format had been done before most recently.
When Scream opened in the Christmas season of 1996, it cleverly presented itself as a straight-up horror but threw in comedy elements. In reality, most horror moives like slashers function more as lighter tone movies. Movies like Motel Hell, Eaten Alive and even the outrageously out of place folk music in Last House on the Left with the bumbling cops seemed to find away to remind us that to take a tag line from Last House, “It’s only a movie.”
What Craven was actually did with the first two Scream movies what Alfred Hitchcock often did, throwing in cliched tropes cleverly that he was mocking them. Take North by Northwest were Martin Landau’s villain character is trying to push Cary Grant’s character off Mount Rushmore but is shot by a cop as Jason Mason’s character, arrested in handcuffs, mocks it. It’s a deus ex machina ending by Hitchcock was winking at us showing us how this has become more common in movies by that time.
That might be why when Mel Brooks made High Anxiety, a parody of Hitchcock’s spoofs, it wasn’t received as well as his other movies. It’s still a great movie, but it doesn’t have the cleverness of giving Marcel Marceau the only line of dialogue in Silent Movie. There’s ways you can have fun with the audience while still trying to impress the critics and film scholars. I felt the comedy troupe was trying to do that with this movie. What made Blazing Saddles work is that Brooks didn’t shy away from let us know it was a western.
Club Dread works better as a horror movie than it does as a comedy. The movie is set on a tropical island known as Coconut Pete’s Pleasure Island where vacationers flock for a weekly getaway of sex, drugs, alcohol and debauchery. Coconut Pete (Bill Paxton), is a washed up former musician who turned the island into his way of still staying popular mostly with fans who want to interact with him as he tries to stay relevant.
Pete is a parody of Jimmy Buffet, who passed away on Sept. 1, and Paxton plays him brilliantly as a burned-out middle-aged musician who is still trying to relive his glory days. With his scruffy beard stubble that seems to be left on after a week of no shaving, his hair is long and mostly unkempt and his skin is just a little sunburnt. The fact that most of the vacationers are a good 10-15 years younger than he and that they’re just there for the hedonism is something I wish the troupe had played more on.
A killer is on the loose who wears tropical tiki masks and seems to be targeting the employees of the island. In the opening, we get the traditional send-up in which characters (and eventual victims) go off to have sex before meeting their ends. And the troupe with Jay Chandrasekar directing offer a good introduction to each of their characters will seeting them up as the suspected killer. Lars Bronkhorst (Kevin Heffernan) is the newly hired masseur who arrives on the island with the boat of partygoers. He’s a Buddhist and a Pacifist who is also a huge Cocount Pete fan that he gets to play the guitar with him around the campfire.
Pete’s nephew, Dave Conable, is the deejay of the night club who also functions as the go-to guy for drugs like cannabis and probably ectasy. Puttman Livingston (Chandrasekhar) is the tennis instructor who speaks in a thick British accent and has huge dreadlocks. There’s the divemaster, Juan Castillo (Steve Lemme), who is from Nicaragua and is known for his sexual exploits with other staff and guests. And finally there Sam (Eric Stolhanske), who is the “Fun Police” meaning he’s in charge of games and activities.
Along with them is Jenny (Brittany Daniel), an aerobics instructor who becamed somewhat famous for appearing on an exercise TV show. Daniel might be one of the best casting choices along with Paxton in the movie. Her sweet smile and bubbling attidude matches good comedy timing with the troupe. Also arriving off the boat is Penelope (Jordan Ladd) a gymnast from Alaska, who eventually falls for Juan. Ladd, who recently appeared in the dreadful Cabin Fever is a nice addition if for anything else for nod to that awful movie.
Eventually as the murders become known, the staff along with Pete and Hank (M.C. Gainey), head of security, decide to keep the murders a secret from the guests. With their radio equipment damaged and all speed boats unoperable, they decide to just wait it out until the ferry boat comes. And the other staff begin to suspect Lars, as the killings started once he arrived on the island.
The mixture of comedy and horror works is uneven. The kills are very gory and bloody. At one point, a decapitated head is shown spinning on a record player. Words are craved into people’s chests. Chandrasekhar and the rest don’t hold back. Scary Movie was violent too but it was done in an over-the-top fashion by having a decapitated head still talking to the point that the killer becomes frustrated and just tosses it in a trash bin. Or in Beetlejuice where a man who was run over and flattened has to spend eternity like that, it was done as an extreme. Up until the end where the killer just seems to be killed and keep coming back, the violence is handled very seriously.
Even Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness were able to be great mixtures of horror blood and guts and absurdist comedy. But the comedy here seems to fall flat at most points. It’s like Broken Lizard had many jokes to tell and used them in Super Troopers. But when it came time to do a follow-up, they brought out their discarded B-material. There is something funny about how Juan calls Penelope “Peen-a-lop.” This is from when Heffernan and Lemme (who has Argente and Puerto Rican ancestry) went to go see Carlito’s Way and heard someone behind them say in a Latino accent “Peen-a-lop? What kind of name is Peen-a-lop” when seeing Penelope Ann Miller in the opening credits.
Paxton has a ball as Pete and Daniel and Ladd play the Scream Queen tropes well but the humor feels more like an “Oh, yeah, I see it” style rather than something that will make you laugh. When a character tries to run from the killer, they try to run but the killer just slowly walks and as they fumble around getting a golf cart started, they realize the killer catches up and it’s lights out. But there’s a lot of bad acting and overacting that I don’t know if it’s intentional or not, but it doesn’t work.
It’s a better thriller such as a scene in which a character who is playing the fruit in a real-life Pac-Man style game (which is very creative) is stalked by the killer and runs through a maze in an ode to The Shining. And there are other odes such as when Dave tells the people around the campfire about “Machete Phil” a guest who went nuts after having sex with a corpse. This is subtle references to the opening of Terror Train and The Fog, both of which are Jamie Lee Curtis’ earlier movies.
But in the end, it feels like Broken Lizard knew their new fans would expect the same as Super Troopers and went the opposite way. Some would say it’s clever. Other would say it was a huge misfire. I’d call it an effort that comes up short. Then, they kind of return to form with their next movie, Beerfest, which is more favored by their fans. Since Club Dread is sandwiched between Troopers and Beerfest, it’s really not their best but far from their worse. Quasi has that distinction.
When the killer’s identity is finally revealed, the Broken Lizard member playing him does a wonderful job at playing a pscyhopath. And considering he’s a very pleasant guy in real life who interacts with his fans on social media a lot, it’s nice range. And to give much else away, but Heffernan playing the heroic Lars is a complete 180 from his role as the bumbling antagonistic Rod Farva in Troopers. The recently deceased Buffett, himself, was a huge fan of the movie and even asked permission to perform Coconut Pete’s music in his own shows, which the troupe allowed and was happy to do.
Reviews were mostly negative and the movie bombed at the box office failing even to make even on a $8.5 million budget. I feel most people were disappointed and found themselves just watching a glorified slasher movie so that’s why they stayed away. It still has its legion of fans as a cult status nearly 20 years later. But if there is any creedence to the phrase, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” then it must be harder for comedy horror.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 