
Interestingly enough, I have never been a member of a book club, nor have I heard of one being the source of murders. Nonetheless, here I am watching a movie about one!
Synopsis:
Eight horror-loving friends fight for their lives when a killer clown who seems to know the grim secret they share begins to pick them off, one by one.
IMDb: 4.5
Rotten Tomatoes: 8%
There’s only one thing I hate more than that ‘where are they now?” BS at the end of those teen movies where they tell you that Stan went to Yale and married Tanya, while Henry never left Park View High and bought a gas station. And that’s the slow motion beginning to teen movies where they freeze frame on the character’s face the first time you see them and in big letters, they spell out their name. I’m not going to remember their names. It’s not important. What’s important is that they die horrible gruesome deaths, right?
This Spanish Netflix exclusive, El Club de los Lectores Criminales, has a promising poster and an interesting trailer. I always enjoy these films that clock in under 90 minutes, because if they’re good, that means they’re fast paced, and if they’re bad, I didn’t waste that much of my life.
This film takes quite a while to get going, though. And by that, I mean, it’s over 25 minutes before the “incident” happens that starts in motion the whole plot. In typical I Know What You Did Last Summer fashion, they kill a bad dude, but the dead man’s retribution has only one hour minus credits to manifest itself.
I already brought up the 1997 teen classic IKWYDLS, and this is practically a beat for beat remake. The main difference is that this film is fascinated with clowns for some reason. Oh, and instead of getting those titular notes, they get text messages with a link to an ongoing novel that will kill a person for each chapter. Welcome to 2023.
The plot is nothing new. As I’ve stated before, it’s an age-old tale of revenge for a mistake made by young kids who don’t know any better, but in this case, you HAVE to have an identifiable killer, a new angle, and scary set pieces with creative kills.
With that being said, we have a good antagonist in the clown costumed killer. Where it suffers is that they stereotype the kids, going so far as to even name them in the ongoing novel as their parts I.e., ‘the Brat,’ ‘the Wild Man,’ ‘the Emo,’ etc.
The new angle has to do with coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns. I don’t like clowns. Chances are, you don’t like clowns. It works.
We even have plenty of decent kills including some fun little chase scenes with plentiful gore and scares, another of the three criteria I mentioned.
So why does it feel like it doesn’t work?
To answer that question in as little words as possible, it just feels like the film is hoping you’re too young to remember the much better and much more original teen films of the 1990s. It’s safe to say that the film pays homage to that quick little blip in time when Kevin Williamson was the king of horror. It cannibalizes all of the major hits. The killer reminds me of Valentine, while the plot is similar to I Know What You Did Last Summer, and they even have a girl who explains everything about horror like Randy in Scream.
Do yourself a favor and go back and watch the originals. But if you’re like me, and love that time period of film, then watch this. It’s really damn good. It’s just a bit ‘been there done that.’
6.0/10 Stab Wounds