February
27, 2004 | There is no excuse for Broken Lizard's Club Dread,
a fiasco bad enough to leave a stain on the screen. Super Troopers,
the previous movie written and performed by the five-man Broken Lizard
comedy troupe, was a wildly uneven, hit-and-miss enterprise. But it
was a full-scale laugh riot compared to the troupe's latest effort,
a feeble parody of summer-camp comedies and slasher-killer thrillers.
The
body count mounts on Pleasure Island, a Caribbean resort owned and operated
by Cocoanut Pete (Bill Paxton), a blissfully burnt-out pop star whose
musical oeuvre suggests the work of a tone-deaf, brain-dead Jimmy
Buffett. Party-hearty visitors and staffers are only gradually distracted
from hedonistic activities - casual sex, recreational drugs, live-action
Pac-Man games - by the murderous spree of a machete-wielding killer.
Many people are killed, but not quickly enough.
Club
Dread is so bereft of comic invention that, for agonizingly long
stretches, it plays more like a third-rate Friday the 13th knockoff
than a burlesque of such flotsam. (And by the way: Isn't it a bit late
in the day for even attempting such a satire in the first place?) Occasionally,
some curvy female co-star bares her breasts or simulates sexual activity
to liven things up. But it's doubtful that even hard-core hanky-panky
could dispel the heavy air of mind-numbing tedium.
Except
for Paxton, who saunters through most of the movie with the disengaged
geniality of a variety-show guest host, Lizards and non-Lizards alike
overplay aggressively. Indeed, as Club Dread plods interminably
toward its conclusion, there's an unmistakable air of mounting desperation
to all the frat-house prankishness and leering lasciviousness.