Club Dread (2004) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy)

Scoop's notes in white:

Club Dread is the second film from the comedy troupe that created Super Troopers. It 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.

It isn't a good film, and it's not worth going out of your way to see, but I found it an easy enough watch. It has a silly slasher plot, lots of nudity, and lots of jokes. The jokes were hit and miss, mostly miss. In fact, some of it was so unfunny it was downright annoying, but that wasn't what kept the film from being successful.

The problem is that these guys 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.

But the film has some pleasures.

• The nudity is good, especially a gymnastic scene performed by the diminutive Jordan Ladd (Cheryl's daughter) and a body double.
• 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.

Oh, well, the idea probably sounds better than it really is.

As for the plot: Coconut Pete runs his own island version of Club Med off the coast of Costa Rica, and somebody is killing all his staff. Not much more to it than that. 

There are several red herring sub-plots in which various people seem in turn to be the killer, 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. As with the Coconut Pete character, the murder explanation sounded like a good concept, but was executed poorly.

Club Dread is supposed to be a comedy send-up in the 70s style of slasher films by the comedy troop Broken Lizard. It takes place on a tropical island in Costa Rica (actually shot in Mexico) at a young swingers' resort run by a Jimmy Buffet character, called Coconut Pete, and played by Bill Paxton. Somebody starts slashing the staff with a machete, even before the credits. So, everyone has to figure out whodunnit, stay alive, and hide the problems from the guests.

I watched the entire film without so much as a chuckle, and there wasn't a single startle moment in the entire film.  I listened to one of the commentaries, and even after the director pointed out the funny parts, I still found nothing to laugh at. Roger Ebert awarded 2 1/2 stars. My guess is that he is a Jimmy Buffett fan, because Paxton and the Buffett parody was the most entertaining aspect of the film.