Club Dread (2004)

The second film from the comedy group Broken Lizard, "Club Dread" looks, is, and delivers stupid on an impressive scale. That's not to say that stupid is always a bad thing. This film promises stupid, from its obvious premise to its still stupid follow-through, but still entertains despite it not being anywhere as good as its predecessor "Super Troopers" or successor "Beer Fest." The film takes place on a party island, inhabited by throes of drunken, sexually uninhibited, and plied college kids who are looking to blow off some steam. The island is run by musician and Jimmy Buffet-esque performer Coconut Pete, played by a very entertaining Bill Paxton, who provides the bulk of the fun to this film. The film stars the entire troupe of Broken Lizard as the island's staff, who are in charge of such innocuous things as aerobics, running a Pac-man hedge maze, and DJ-ing the drug fueled club dances. Their personas are often obnoxious, addicted, and juvenile, only there to party and have sex with all the people they can. In comes the mysterious killer from the jungle, who slices open the staff with a machete while wearing a mask. A campfire encourages a backstory of a staffer who was tricked into having sex with a corpse and then went insane, killing six other staffers, cutting off his genitalia, and hobbling off into the jungle. The film doesn't work particularly well as a comedy, though it does feature gratuitous nudity, funny accents, and infantile humor. What makes this film still enjoyable after that is that the film actually works really well as a horror film. The best horror films have gruesome and imaginative kills, and with the amount of bloodshed, the variety of deaths, and the murderer having an agenda and all the power in this situation, it becomes a rather riveting film. Even the killer is immensely creepy when revealed, and has a hilarious reason for starting his rampage, which is a joke that I still find seriously funny, even now. Though this might not be the film you're expecting out of a comedy group, the horror in this film is horrifying, which remains its saving grace.