Scoop's notes:
A laid-back singer named Coconut Pete runs his own
island version of Club Med off the coast of Costa Rica, and somebody
is killing all his staff. There are several red herring sub-plots in
which various people seem in turn to be the killer, then there are
several gruesome and kinda funny deaths, and then somebody with no
motivation confesses. It turns out that all the people who had a
motive were sane people like the rest of us, people who may have had
jealousies and problems, but would not act violently on those
feelings. The actual killer, on the other hand, was just plain nuts. I
think it was supposed to be funny that the only guy with no motivation
turned out to be the killer. If it was supposed to be, it missed the
mark.
Like most of the rest of the jokes in the film.
In fact, some of this film is so unfunny as to be
downright annoying, but that isn't what kept the film from being
successful. The problem is that the plot took itself seriously. Club
Dread is the follow-up effort from the comedy troupe that created
Super Troopers. They are talented at lowbrow comedy. They should
have gone for Scary Movie - a wacky genre parody making fun of slasher
movies. Instead they went for Scream - an attempt to make a real
slasher movie, with comedy layered in. By working too hard on the
scares and gore, they got distracted from the strengths of the
writers/performers who are, underneath their mandatory new millennium
naughty sex talk, traditional genre satirists like the cast of SCTV,
and not scare-and-gore guys like Tobe Hooper.
Bill Paxton is pretty funny as Coconut Pete, a
fictional version of Jimmy Buffett. He talks like Buffett, sings like
him, and lives like him. His album titles are all slight twists on
Buffett album titles, although ol' Pete doesn't remember making most
of them because, hey, those were the 70s, dude. Pete is a laid-back
guy unless you mention the one thing he hates - the REAL Jimmy Buffett,
who stole Pete's best song PinaColadaBurg, changed it a little, and
made it famous as Margaritaville.
Club Dread was a miserable failure at the box
office, capping off below five million dollars, despite appearing on
1800 screens across the country. The reviews were only slightly more
enthusiastic than the film audiences, with only 34% of the reviewers
taking a positive view of the film. I don't think it's a good film,
and it's not worth going out of your way to see, but I found it an
easy enough watch. Paxton is good, there are lots of jokes and the
nudity is good, especially a gymnastic scene performed by the
diminutive Jordan Ladd (Cheryl's daughter) and a body double.
