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.
