Reviews

Horror is a genre easily poked fun at, but Club Dread does it with style and finesse. The first five minutes is literally nonstop hilarity as one horror movie staple after another is brilliantly ridiculed with witty dialogue and outlandish, over the top situations which set the tone of the movie to follow.

The humor is genre spanning, featuring not just the drug related humor you'd expect from the creators of Super Troopers, but multiple jokes about Jimmy Buffet and '80s icons Eddie Money and Billy Squier. The focus is clearly on being a horror movie parody, but the humor is diverse enough to keep that formula from going stale.

Well done Broken Lizard, keep them coming!

I've always enjoyed non-linear storytelling. A number of people seem to have picked up on this aspect of the movie and thus dubbed it similar to Pulp Fiction (though no one mentions Reservoir Dogs) when this movie takes non-linear storytelling to a level beyond where Quentin Tarrantino was ever able to go.

Now, certainly Memento came along afterwards and transformed the entire art of non-linear storytelling. However, Memento uses it to keep the movie watcher guessing until the very end, whereas Boondock Saints puts the pieces on the table, letting you try to put them together, but then will continue handing you pieces until the picture becomes clearer.

Clearly the movie is designed to be over-the-top, both from Williem Dafoe's character to the action sequences themselves. Williem Dafoe makes this movie for me. The plot, which centers on religiously-inspired vigilante justice, has an air of being somewhat cliched, although I would be hard pressed to name another movie which handles it in this matter.

I still fail to see how others consider this movie vacuous and without meaning, when its message about the pitfalls of our current legal system and the need for something that transcends it is quite clear. I thought the ending, in which various people are interviewed about their opinion of the "Saints" and how for some vigilante justice was an incredibly sensitive issue, made this point very clear.