‘Killer Book Club’ (2022): Copycat Slashers in Spain

Directed by: Carlos Alonso-Ojea || Produced by: Raimon Masllorens, Antonello Novellino, Arlette Peyret

Screenplay by: Carlos García Miranda || Starring: Veki Velilla, Álvaro Mel, Priscilla Delgado, Iván Pellicer, Hamza Zaidi, María Cerezuela

Music by: Arnau Bataller || Cinematography: Pablo Diez || Edited by: Luis de la Madrid || Country: Spain || Language: Spanish

Running Time: 90 minutes

One of several film “movements” — waves, trends, crazes, what have you — that passed me by was the neo and meta-slasher movement popularized by Wes Craven’s Scream (1996, 1997, 2000) franchise during the late 1990s to early 2000s. Perhaps due to my misunderstanding, as a youngster (I was born in 1990), of the metacommentary of the slasher subgenre, a movement that took over much of Western horror filmmaking from the 1970s (e.g. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974], Halloween [1978]) through the 1980s (e.g. the Friday the 13th [1980-1993] and A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984-1994] franchises, My Bloody Valentine, The Prowler [both 1981]), or because of the apparent cheapness of the many sequels to older yet diminished franchises (e.g. later sequels to the aforementioned Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc., series ), the marketing for various neo-slashers like I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and other, similar features spawned by the success of Scream never hooked me. I still haven’t seen a single entry in the Scream franchise to this day despite my minimal sampling of the most well regarded of the original slasher films from well before my time.

Our titular group of bookworms discuss an oddly relevant cheapo scary novel about killer clowns in Act One. Good timing! 

With the rise of Netflix and the modern ubiquity of streaming video-on-demand distribution, everyone now has access to most every culture’s remix, retread, satire, or, yes, metacommentary on other film movement from other cultures or previous decades. You can try an Indonesian (e.g. The Raid [2011]) or Tamil (e.g. Kaithi [2019]) take on Die Hard (1988) as well as a mainland Chinese (e.g. The Wandering Earth [2019]) riff on Roland Emmerich’s disaster porn (e.g. Independence Day [1996], The Day After Tomorrow [2004]), a Hong Kong homage (e.g. Warriors of Future [2022]) to Michael Bay’s Transformers (2007-2017) and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009), a German (e.g. Blood Red Sky [2021]) spin on Air Force One (1997; directed by a German, Wolfgang Peterson, funnily enough), a Swedish (e.g. Black Crab [2022]) look at a Tom Clancy-style military thriller (e.g. The Hunt for Red October [1990]) crossed with a Michael Crichton-esque science-fiction procedural (e.g. The Andromeda Strain [1971]), and a Norwegian (e.g. Troll [2022]) attempt at a classic Hollywood (see the MonsterVerse [2014, 2017, 2019, 2021] films) or Japanese kaiju (e.g. Shin Godzilla [2016]) blockbuster with ease.

Most of the above referenced non-English language homages to popular American cinema are quality films given how I prefer, on this site, spreading word about underappreciated filmmaking rather than mocking well known blockbusters (e.g. The Fast and the Furious [2001-]); like any film culture or the many eclectic artistic movements within them at a given time, though, the good stuff floats to the top of a much larger vat of mediocre to poorly made productions. For every Extraction (2020, 2023), there are a half dozen Xtreme (2021)‘s, and for every Tumbbad (2018) or Bulbbul (2020), you can find many more like Prey (no, not that one [2022], that one [2021]) or Killer Book Club.

The latter (Spanish = “El club de los lectores criminales,” or literally The Criminal Readers Club), directed by Carlos Alonso-Ojea as his sophomore feature, is a Spanish production that takes its self-aware genre cues from metatextual neo-slashers in the vein of Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cherry Falls (2000), etc. Its characters are not only well read connoisseurs of horror fiction, but the narrative’s inciting incident is an accidental homicide resulting from a sympathetic prank gone wrong, which terrifies its teenage perpetrators into oaths of silence, only for them to be later pursued by a bloodthirsty killer in a cartoonish Halloween mask who acts as a sort of avenging Angel of Death.

The problems with this formulaic setup are not the script’s archetypal nature but rather, as with most weaker films, a function of lackluster execution. The predictability of this slasher’s central whodunnit mystery is bad enough, but the plodding nature of the rising castmember body count robs the film of much of its tension, while the final revelation makes the previous narrative misdirects feel pointless. Some of the gory kills are nice and I appreciate the creative use of university campus scenery throughout the horror sequences, but there’s not much mood, memorable cinematography, or any standout performances to elevate the boilerplate plot, no toppings for this vanilla ice cream.

A mysterious masked Ghostface… uh, I mean masked clown, stalks our heroes one at a time.

While I appreciate Killer Book Club for not outright wasting my time (it sticks to the long established horror convention of a 90-minute runtime), there are many other, better horror or horror-adjacent pictures on Netflix alone worth seeing before this, to say nothing of A24’s arthouse (e.g. The Witch, Green Room [both 2015], Hereditary [2018]), and Blumhouse’s populist (e.g. The Purge [2013, 2014, 2016], Split [2016], Get Out [2017],  The Invisible Man [2020], The Black Phone [2021]) theatrical releases. The film is mildly entertaining in its best moments, yet in hindsight feels like significant character-driven setup for minimal stylistic payoff; again, as much as I don’t mind storytelling formula in general and even prefer it in most genre films, what director Carlos Alonso-Ojea shows us is little more than how much Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer made an impression on him. Because of that, what Killer Book Club represents is far more interesting than the film itself.

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SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATION: Filmmakers riffing on styles from other cultures is an interesting sociological phenomenon, but these copycat movies must be creative enough to stand apart or competent enough to influence others for those inspirations to be artistically meaningful. Killer Book Club is little different from the 2010s wave of unnecessary Hollywood remakes of the industry’s own genre classics from the 1980s (e.g. Conan the Barbarian [2011], Red Dawn, Total Recall [both 2012], Robocop [2014]), save for how it is an original intellectual property, at least in name. That’s something, I guess.

— However… despite how forgettable the main characters are, Book Club is at least a good-looking movie that manages some fun chase sequences capped by several gory deaths.

—> NOT RECOMMENDED

? What kind of pickaxe/hatchet/hammer did the killer(s) use?