Le Book club mortel

Spanish-language riff on Scream and other '90s meta horror takes most of its best ideas from other movies. It keeps things from getting entirely stale by tweaking the formulas a bit, although there's very little original or unexpected. Attempted jump-scares are banal and predictable. The biggest horror here is the protagonist's haircut, which is clearly the work of a disturbed sadist with an irrational vendetta. The person playing the protagonist seems like a lovely person and a fine actress, but good grief: whoever cut her hair is a deranged butcher with an intrinsic hatred of all that is decent and holy.

Originality: zero points. But hey, if you read the synopsis and behold the film poster of "Killer Book Club", and you are still secretly hoping to see an original and unpredictable slasher mystery, then I am sorry to announce there's something very wrong with your expectation management. "Killer Book Club" - or "El Club de los Lectores Criminales" as it sounds much cooler in Spanish - delivers exactly what it promises: pretty & posh, but empty-headed teenagers getting brutally slashed by a freak in a rudimentary clown's mask. Too insulting for your IQ? Please watch "Poor Things" or "The Substance" instead.

This sick Netflix puppy takes its inspiration from the two biggest (not necessarily the best) horror blockbusters of the 1990s, namely "Scream" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer". A group of (fake) campus friends plan to scare the bejesus out of a pervy teacher who went #MeToo on a student, but their prank naturally results in a gruesome death. Immediately after the mandatory "I swear I'll never tell anyone!" sequence, the group finds themselves pursued and relentlessly killed by someone with a mask and a mountaineers' ice axe. Will you hope & pray for someone in the club to survive this horrible ordeal? Not particularly...

Your first guess for the killer's identity will probably already the right one. Every "twist" in the script is laughably predictable and even the finale is blatantly copied from the aforementioned 90s flicks. Don't think. Don't get annoyed. Simply enjoy the gore.

The Horror aspect is okay. With a big drop of in the end. And the look of the movie is most of the time not to bad.

The setting seams promising and gives you the vibe of classics like scream. But the movie fails du deliver on that promise, and ends to be a really bland and uncreative movie. Its just a compilation of old and bad cliche, executed even worse.

With characters that stupid you can't stand this movie and you want to turn it off.

After watching the movie I have to say, one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. Wasted potential, because you get the feeling, there would have been a fun story to be told in this giant mess. Nothing original or new, but atleast something fun. But especially about the end of this movie I can't say that.

I'd say, rather watch any of the Scream movies again, than to watch this.

Plot

After being complicit in a costume joke that ends in a fatal accident and a pact of silence, a group of young people will be threatened by an anonymous writer who wants to reveal his dark secret. Their stalker threatens to post a bloody horror novel based on them on social media. Each chapter one of them will die. While distrusting each other, the group will begin a fight for survival in the middle of the university campus. Any one of them could be the next victim, or the killer.

Cast

Unfamiliar with the creator or the cast, but the young bunch are a very mixed bag of what I hope are inexperienced actors as some are positively dreadful. Leading lady Veki Velilla was the stand out performance but still nothing notable.

Verdict

I grew up in the 80's and being a horror fanatic you can probably imagine how many slashers I watched! It was the generation for them after all. It was a genre which in truth pretty much died until Scream came out and made it hip again with modern trendy music, style and an attractive young cast. Thing is, though I thought the first couple were watchable enough they were rather uninspired and certainly aimed at people who hadn't seen all those that came before them. Scream 3 and beyond, pretty offensively colour by numbers.

Killer Book Club doesn't draw influence from Scream, it full on plagiarizes it except delivers dreadful kill sequences. From the cast, to the setting to the attempted style, to the killer motivations and to the big twist which pretty much every single Scream movie has as well

If you've seen a Scream film you've already seen this and I cannot stress how little I'm exaggerating! Replace the clown with ghostface and it would be indistinguishable!

The writers should be sued and quite frankly embarrassed at how little they made an effort here.

Rants

You know a common problem with slashers is the kills, there's only so many inventive ways you can have someone stabbed or bludgeoned but some movies step outside the box and offer us something great. Then there's movies that do generic uninspired copy and paste kills and that's what we have here while sprinkled with an even worse offender...........the cutaway kills type! Bad kills and off camera kills? For shame!

Breakdown.

Neat killer appearance Unoriginal to offensive levels Piss poor cast Dreadful kills.

They have put in money and muscels in this spanish slasher, but left out ideas and charm , its actually boring to watch , and most of all, the "clown" look corky , and not because they want it , they want a creepy clown , but it didnt work out that well

If I describe this movie with one word, its annoying,,, the movie is annoying,, the acters are annoying and even the killer is annoying, you just want them all dead cause they are so annoying , the final girl are the worst and cause she will be to the end, I reached for the remote controll

Acting is more horrible than the movie, but sure , they have really tried to do a good slasher , but its just not that good and most of all I think its hard to invent the wheel twice, this movie have been 100 of times before allready, we have seen this to often.