Movie Review
'Club Dread' swill: booze, bawdiness and bodies in the blender

By Ted Fry
Special to The Seattle Times

	LACEY TERRELL / FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES Steve Lemme, left, Bill Paxton and Jay Chandrasekhar in "Broken Lizard's Club Dread," which mixes the worst elements of slasher flicks and teen sex romps.
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But with so much junk being passed off as popular entertainment on TV and movie screens these days, it's no surprise that audience expectations make this kind of drivel hit material in spite of itself.

This is technically the third movie from the five-man group known as Broken Lizard. Their breakthrough 2001 effort, "Super Troopers," was slightly more deserving of the praise it received for comic invention, even though it fell far short of classic status.

Fans expecting more of the same may be startled by the tone of "Club Dread," if not the lackluster, juvenile nature of the gags. This is no "Scary Movie" spoof; rather it's a shabby attempt at mixing elements of a teen slasher flick with the lowbrow laughs of a teen sex romp. Neither one adds up to the sum of its whole.

Movie review Showtimes and trailer * "Broken Lizard's Club Dread," with Bill Paxton, Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme. Directed by Chandrasekhar, from a script by Broken Lizard. 90 minutes. Rated R for violence/gore, sexual content, language and drug use. Several theaters.

The setting is a Costa Rican paradise where a batch of hedonistic youngsters have arrived at "Coconut Pete's Pleasure Island" resort for a week of drinking, drugging and casual sex. The place is run by a ragtag bunch of fun-lovers (played by the Broken Lizard guys, plus a few busty babes), with a washed-up '70s rock star as their employer.

One of the only bright spots is Bill Paxton as Coconut Pete, the zonked-out Jimmy Buffet wannabe (his big hit was "Piña Colada-burg") who's been stuck in the same rum-and-reefer-fueled haze since 1978. In an assortment of rumpled, unbuttoned tropical shirts and a greasy longhair wig, Paxton chews the island scenery with glassy-eyed abandon.

His Broken Lizard co-stars are considerably less effective playing camp-counselor types who are one-by-one stalked and brutally murdered by a machete-wielding maniac.

There's the effeminate Rasta tennis pro, the hunky Latin cliff diver, the Zen-obsessed masseuse and the drug-addled social director. Throw in a few topless bimbos, graphic gore and nonstop sex jokes and you have the worst of both genre-movie worlds.

There are few amusing bits — a real-life Pac Man game that uses a hedge maze with scantily clad girls, alcoholic drinks and human fruit, and a running gag about the "Fun Police" — but it's far too little to lift things out of the lower depths of mediocrity.

Ted Fry: tedfry@earthlink.net

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