PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 2/26/04)

It doesn’t seem as if the slasher genre is as ripe for parody as it was, well, before so many parodies of it hit the screen, but then again, cop movies looked as if they had been well and truly taken care of back when the comedy team Broken Lizard concocted the riotous Super Troopers in 2001. And "parody" may be the wrong word anyway. The Broken Lizard guys don’t so much send up a genre as inhabit it, and subvert it from the inside. Hence, both Super Troopers and Club Dread feature characters that are almost plausible and ingratiating, and story lines that work as story lines--up to a point. Here, they take their hijinks to a decidedly cheesy Caribbean resort run by ravaged Jimmy Buffett clone Coconut Pete (Bill Paxton), which is suddenly blighted by a series of grisly homicides against the staffers. Said goofballs include a dreadlocked tennis pro with remarkably dopey British accent (director Jay Chandrasekhar), a too-kindly masseuse with a variety of "magic touches" (Kevin Heffernan), a slick "Latin" lover-boy with an accent almost as ridiculous as the tennis pro’s (Steve Lemme), and more. The movie plays the homicides a little straighter than most send-ups do--once or twice the movie makes you jump out of your seat, and it’s pretty bloody throughout. But by maintaining this interdiegetic verisimilitude, they make the humor that much funnier. And boy, is this funny. Beginning with little bits and pieces of stoner/gross-out humor that keeps the chortles consistent, and building to crescendos of absurdity that are flat-out sidesplitting, the laughs in Club Dread remain their own reward even after the chop-chop ghastliness has gone beyond the pale.

—Glenn Kenny