Le Book club mortel

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.

The premise of 'I know what you did last summer' but with every other story beat taken from 'Scream'.

Scream subverted the classic slasher movies of the 90s. This movie leans more into the literary world but doesn't capitalise on it. Doesn't help that the caracters are just generally obnoxious. They mentioned the killer clown phenomenon but didn't explore it beyond the mere mention of it, it could've leaned into the mass hysteria aspect of it more. I'm really disappointed since spanish indie movie makers tend to have a better grasp on what makes horror good.

Just watch Scream instead it hold up better.

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 movie tries to pretend to be a "Spanish version" of Scream but it does not work.

The characters are so corny and not interesting, that you are just waiting when every one of them is killed.

There is no atmosphere there that could hold your attention, despite all the flaws in the movie.

The script tries to copy the original Scream step by step.

Acting is so terrible, that you think that every one of these Spanish actors is an amateur who was accidentally invited to the set.

And the ending is,,,one of the worst endings in slashers. So, instead of this, it's better to rewatch the whole Scream trilogy.

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.