Club Dread
The bicoastal comedy troupe Broken Lizard got its start when the five constituent members were undergraduates at Colgate University and a lazy haze of weed-and-sex dorm humor still hung over their projects. The group's website likens them to Monty Python and the Kids in the Hall, but that's a notion sillier than anything in their third film, an amiably mild teen-slasher parody called (deep breath now) "Broken Lizard's Club Dread." Where the Pythons were cruelly anarchic satirists and the Kids bright absurdists, Broken Lizard offers a few good gags and a lot of stoner ribaldry.
Which, if you're 20, male, and in a pharmaceutically altered mood on a Saturday night, may well be enough. But Broken Lizard and its audience have a ways to go before anyone can start calling this stuff genius.
That said, "Club Dread" is a bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves. They are: Jay Chandrasekhar (pompous and prissy), who also directed; Kevin Heffernan (husky and playful); Steve Lemme (handsome and swaggering); Paul Soter (manic and goofy); and Erik Stolhanske (wired and edgy). Along with cast members who don't live to see the end credits, they play the staff of a hedonistic vacation retreat called Pleasure Island -- think Club Med for the spring break crowd.
The island resort is owned and operated by an addled, past-his-prime pop star named Coconut Pete, played in the film's wittiest turn by Bill Paxton ("Titanic"). Pete's a genial enough hippie host, although he's still steamed that his biggest hit, "Pina Colada-burg," was ripped off by Jimmy Buffett for "Margaritaville." Neither he nor his staff are prepared for the appearance of a machete-wielding maniac whose victims are killed in ways that mimic the lyrics of a particularly obscure Cuban Pete song, one that even he was too stoned to remember recording.
The murders are bloody enough to qualify "Club Dread" as homage as well as parody, and the appearance of actress Jordan Ladd, who starred in Eli Roth's tatty cult-horror opus "Cabin Fever," gives the film additional schlock cred. She plays vacationing sex-bunny Penelope -- pronounced "Peen-a-lope" by Juan (Lemme), the Costa Rican diving instructor/lothario who beds her. Actress/model Brittany Daniel plays bikinied fitness instructor Jenny, one of the few female characters smart enough to go the distance, but her primary appeal may be gauged by the hormonal sighs that greeted shots in which she walks away from the camera at the college-crowd preview screening I attended.
For every moment of slap-happy invention -- one of the games the staff comes up with for the revelers is a garden-maze version of Pac-Man, complete with sound effects -- there are five that just sit there with a zonked smile. Part of the problem is that the Broken Lizard brand of humor is so unsurprising and reactive: a pot joke here, a rude comeback there, plenty of skin to keep the natives from getting restless. It's all designed to confirm the frat-house complacency of the Lizard's audience rather than confront it, which, last time I checked, is what satire is supposed to do.
The boys themselves are likable -- I wished I'd seen more of the crisply dumb romantic byplay between the hulking Heffernan and Daniel -- but that urge to be liked may be what keeps Broken Lizard from comic greatness. Heck, even a little comic goodness would be welcome.
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