Rating: ***
Starring: Veki Velilla, Álvaro Mel, Priscilla Delgado
For the first few minutes, we see a room littered with book pages, a woman getting doused in gasoline and a girl setting everything ablaze with a burning copy of Don Quixote. Moving ahead six years later, we now follow college teen Ángela (Veki Velilla), an aspiring best-selling author and a member of the campus's book club which consists of her friends and acquaintances. She's feeling quite unsure of the quality of her own writing lately so she decided to meet up with a professor after class for some advice, but what Ángela got instead is a very bad time when the guy got too handsy and she narrowly escaped a rape attempt after she opted to be more than the slime ball could handle physically. The assault leaves the shy book writer traumatized but fortunately for her, the book club has her back and they all plan to get even on the shmuck by pranking him hard.
As the night for revenge comes, everything was going according to plan; dress up in matching clown costumes, break into the professor's office, smash some shit and scare the bastard shitless, but all of this excitement goes horribly awry when the educator gets attacked for real, leading to him stumbling off a building floor and getting skewered through a statue's spear. Horrified of this unexpected turn, everyone involved in the prank swears secrecy, burns away their costumes and tries moving on with their lives in the midst of the media circus the professor's supposed accident/suicide eventually reels in the following morning.
No soon after, though, the gang gets an email invite to read the very first chapter of a new online horror novel penned by someone monikered "Madclown", detailing a familiar scenario of eight book club members who killed their professor out of revenge. The writer promises death to the killer book club and, true enough, our gang starts getting stalked, hunted and murdered one by one by a figure wearing a familiar-looking clown costume, wielding a deadly rock pick...
Looking into the plot, there's not much to write home about Killer Book Club (2023)'s story as it is basically a mash-up of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)'s secrets-unburied-turn-deadly gig and Scream (1996)'s meta-horror murder mystery, down to the characters getting their trust tested as they suspect one another of masterminding the attacks and disappearances, as well as the gang discussing the possibility of our villain being a horror buff considering their knowledge of slasher tropes and using this hunch to narrow down their potential suspects. There's little room for surprises here, though there is an attempt for novelty as the killer writes down the murders as chapters for their online novel, posting them moments after doing the deadly deed.
Execution-wise, the movie still does enough good to warrant a viewing; while the direction has its moments relying on the characters' odd and/or dumb choices to get the story going (like answering and following a text that's obviously a trap, or going along with a suspicious invitation to a book horror fair where everyone is dressed up as clowns), there's a charm to its familiarity, like a low-key throwback to the ideologies of postmodernism and skepticism commonly found within most 90s teen horror. The murder scenes are also among the movie's stronger points as a fair bundle of them have decent set-pieces and chase scenes, shot and edited to showcase the energy of their cat-and-mouse antics and a few are even punctuated with gruesomely bloody slayings. The camera work is scenic at its best, the acting is passable and even though the mystery behind the murders gets answered in the climax unspectacularly at first, we do get an unexpected twist that ties most of the loose ends wonderfully and makes the final act devilishly fun.
Killer Book Club (2023) may have failed to bring anything new to the table, it does still deliver the bodycount goods and, honestly, it all could have been worse. Should you find yourself in a charitable mood for a teen slasher mystery at its most basic and don't mind some pastiche along the way, this one's a good watch!
Bodycount:
1 female doused in gasoline and set on fire
1 male fell off a building and lands on a statue, impaled
1 male gutted with a rock pick
1 female impaled through with a rock pick's handle
1 male found dying from a throat cut
1 female found dying from a stabbed chest
1 male knocked off a building and impaled mouth-first through a statue
1 female caught on fire, burned to death
Total: 8
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