Killer Book Club (2023)
This one isn’t clowning around.
When I’m left to coming up with my own tagline for a movie, you know it’s going to be so much more dumb than what they could have just come up with themselves. I was left to my own devices again, so you know what that ends up meaning - back to a horror movie! Don’t get me wrong, I love action and all that sort of stuff, but there’s something to the face level simplicity of a horror movie - especially an initial entry type of horror movie - that lets me just have a fun time. Maybe it’s the body count? Gear up for the least clown looking clown killer you’ve ever seen, tonight we watch Killer Book Club.
I’ll save all of us my horrid attempt at Spanish pronunciation and leave it at the english title. Our story here is pretty exactly in the title really. A book club happens to love horror, and one of them or perhaps someone they know is a killer, and now the book club is slowly becoming the killed book club. To unpack it somewhat without going into any twists and turns that develop as the movie goes, a group of - I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be college - kids in a book club where they like to read all that horror stuff end up banding together to prank a professor who got a bit rape-y with one of their members. Said prank leads to the professors death, and the gang all swear not to talk about it - very I know what you did in that sense. Someone taking up a persona of the clown they used to do the prank starts making a story about them though, and they slowly start getting picked off one by one.Could it be someone from the past? Is it one of them upset over something enough to kill? Could a mysterious nobody have happened to stumble upon it and decide it’s the perfect time to get their murder kicks in? Only the movie will tell.
There’s going to be an obvious drop off for performance reading on my end since I don’t speak Spanish and went for the dub. It looks like the actors are doing a good job, at least with body language and facial expressions - but they don’t always accurately get sold as well by the dubbing. It’s not horrible by any means, it’s just rather easy to notice the loss of sync between the voices and the mouths - kind of like but not quite as bad as watching the old English-dubbed Gojira where they shoe-horned in American scenes. Still, even with that there’s times when the dub-overs do a good job, but I feel that there might be more of an emotional impact from the actors in it’s native tongue than in the dub. As stated, the actors do a good job with body language, and you can get the general mood a person is in just by watching them. The killer feels a bit floaty at times, probably on account of the loose-ness of the suit. That said, for the fact it’s just a winky ball face and a loose fitting garb it does manage to intimidate at times. Perhaps not quite as iconic as our boy Ghost Face, but provides just as much lack of facial expression that often helps make a killer more menacing and inhuman feeling in the genre.
Character cart is loaded with a whole bunch of the stereotypes, and arguably the movie doesn’t do a whole lot to flesh out all these characters. From the large numbers at the front end when it’s introducing them one by one, you can guess there will most likely be a body count, and you’ll probably be dying for at least two or three characters to get offed just from not liking them. The actors do a decent job of bring the character out of the script, but I wouldn’t call most the cast anything more than just a fodder level cliche - and the movie pointing it out doesn’t change it any. Props for being self aware like plenty of the movies are, but it also doesn’t mean that more than three characters have any feasible impact on the plot in it’s actuality. Granted, our lack of knowing much of anything outside of personalities does help the mystery side element of “whose the killer” - as it would anywhere - but it also means that there isn’t a ton of room for a development of characters that would draw people in who aren’t already going to watch it because it looks like an alright slasher movie.
The book club
Costumes are pretty modern, so there isn’t a whole lot to be hugely impressed with. That’s not to crap on the movie of course - it’s role is to blend in and feel natural, so it’s doing it’s job great in that regard. Even the killer feels pretty generic bargin-bin Halloween store, which is largely the intent there as well. It stands out enough that it doesn’t feel like very other single character in a white mask - probably in part because the mass of that melon giving it a bobble-head feel. The weapon ends up being what I assume is some sort of climbing pick hammer multitool guy, which I’m really not sure why it was being sold in the same store as costumes, but maybe that’s a regional thing (and I’m sure the ones bought for the prank weren’t real anyways… at least you’d hope). The characters do have an easy time looking different from each other as well, through various costume bits like piercings so it’s pretty easy to keep them apart in your head.
The body count is there. I wouldn’t say it’s anything super innovative - although the Don Quixote lance death of the professor surprised me even though I should have seen it coming. Nothing really ends up being super graphic - I mean, yeah it get’s bloody with a good amount of spike-end penetration, but it’s not like guts are rolling about or eyeballs are popping out of faces or anything. Like, you can see why this is more of a teen-scare sort of TV flick rating than a hard R, as most the violence is largely blood. The effects work to go with it isn’t bad, but given the subdued nature of most the kills it’s not something that a person is really expecting WETA levels of polish and impressions from. You won’t be upset over what’s there - but the more slaughter happy crowd may wish for something more elaborate and impressive than the more down-to-earth stuff that’s in here.
I saw a lot of comparisons to the Scream franchise here, and I do kind of get it. The movie has a level of that self awareness to it - it calls out things like the tropes, but I don’t feel like this one really leverages it in any meaningful way. From the get go, you’ll have one or two people pegged as the possible killer, and despite plenty of potential red herrings or misdirects there’s a good chance you’ll still be right by the end of the movie. This doesn’t make it bad per say - it actually pulled in some good stuff (that i really couldn’t have guessed until plot progression unless I had known in advance) to play with, almost giving it that level of being a different movie if you watch it a second time - but I think for me the kills aren’t quite as memorable. What it actually ends up being is almost like a fan fiction blend of a bunch of different things - in my particular case of course I fall to movies, as I’m not a big horror literature kind of guy - which is made more entertaining by the fact that it’s a through line of sort in the plot of the movie itself.
The laugh track
This wasn’t too bad. I enjoyed a bunch of it, but admittedly I should have tried going for the original audio instead to see if it punched up some of the performances. If I ever go back and watch it again I probably will, but although it was a pretty good ride and had a bunch of stuff I did like in it, I don’t see myself really going out of my way to do so. It’s a novel idea, even if it didn’t really play as much with elements that I thought it was going to - but it led to a nice little mystery with some twists and turns, a few fun scenes, and probably a bunch for thoughtful types to pull out of it in regards to trauma and stress and stuff like that.