Killer Book Club review
While not as bad as its rotten tomatoes score would have you believe…Killer Book Club neve rises above decent with a side of intriguing (but underdeveloped) ideas.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Killer Book Club
Directed by Carlos Alonso Ojea
Written by Carlos García Miranda
Starring Veki Velilla, Iván Pellicer, Álvaro Mel, Daniel Grao, Priscilla Delgado, Iván López, Carlos Alcaide and Carmela Lloret
Killer Book Club Review
Netflix’s Killer Book Club wants to be Scream for books…as a movie…or something. It’s hard to tell exactly what the movie wants to be. There’s a heavy air of I Know What You Did Last Summer in the mix…which is fitting since that movie fell far short of being Scream too. In a classic case of learning the wrong lessons…many post-Scream movies of the late 90s/early 2000s thought that casting young actors from teen favorite tv shows and filling their mouths with pithy dialog was the key to the 1996 meta-horror-slasher’s success.
Wes Craven’s film, of course, has a lot more going for it than that. For starters…it’s a brilliant dissection of a famous era of horror movies. Delivering something wholly original while parading around tropes in a way that had never been done before. What followed was a series of movies (one of its own sequels included) that missed the mark entirely.
What do lesser slashers from a quarter of a century ago have to do with Killer Book Club? Well…if you told me that this was a movie made in 1999 that somehow just found its way onto streaming…I wouldn’t just believe you…I’d say it explains a lot. This wannabe does attempt to tie in some meta-commentary of its own…but it does so for a format that was never going to work. Here, horror novels are the target. Complete with a classroom scene targeting the supposed tropes of horror fiction. It’s such a vast and moving target that the movie is never able to precisely pinpoint what it wants to skewer. Except some teens, of course.
The concept isn’t entirely wasted. As the bodies start piling up (or more accurately…disappearing) the killer is dropping new chapters of his own horror novel to the public. An early scene sees our core group rushing through locations mentioned in the story to find a missing friend. An effective scene that promises a more thoughtful and exciting story than ever manifests on screen. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Killer Book Club is the story of a group of friends stalked by a killer who knows what they did last semester. Namely…caused the death of their creepy horror hating literature professor. The movie makes an odd choice in giving us an inciting incident involving the death of someone who we hate immediately. In his two scenes we see the teacher crap on horror stories and then try to force himself on a student. The book club decides to teach him a lesson resulting in an accidental fall to his death. They make a pact to bury the moment in the past. Of course…someone knows what they did and dons a clown mask more funny than creepy and begins to pick them off one by one.
Obviously, that means we get some investigative horror in Killer Book Club. Like every other aspect of the movie…it’s underdeveloped and unmemorable. There’s little reason to care about any of the characters we follow…or any of the suspects they line up. While trying to throw in a few meta-lines here and there…Killer Book Club forgets to create much in the way of its characters.
The whole thing amounts to a whodunnit that more often resembles a who cares? There are some decent kills and decent performances, and it looks…decent. It’s rarely anything more than that. That early tease at creativity and energy gives way to repetition and lackluster thrills. Decent…but unmemorable. Even the sequel tease at the end (featuring another classroom scene…talking about sequels…to books) follows the pattern of the film itself. It thinks it’s doing something clever…and it ends up underdelivering on that promise.
Killer Book Club isn’t quite as bad as its rotten tomatoes score would have you believe. But it isn’t good either. It’s a movie that undercuts its best ideas…chasing them away with things we’ve seen too many times before. I’m not even saying we’ve seen it done better that many times…just that we’ve seen it. The story opens with an exciting chapter or two…but never becomes the page-turner it acts like it is.
Scare Value
A lot of Killer Book Club is derivative. Derived from things late 90s kids might love. Which means there could be an audience somewhere. An I Know What You Did Last Summer story that desperately wishes it was a Scream story. Fans of those movies will recognize that as a devastating put down. Everyone else will at least know what to expect from Killer Book Club.
2/5
Killer Book Club Link
Streaming on Netflix
