25 years ago, Fox Searchlight released New York sketch comedy troupe Broken Lizard‘s 2001 stoner classic Super Troopers. The group of ex-frat guys have been struggling to break free of its success ever since. Part of the problem is that Broken Lizard’s established fans, as well as their target demographic of arrested adolescents, seem to mostly want the comedians to keep remaking their initial breakthrough, as contributors to Super Troopers 2‘s wildly successful crowdfunding campaign (and anyone buying a ticket to Super Troopers 3) can tell you. Unfortunately, that first sequel, as well as most of the group’s preceding ensemble comedies, just aren’t as good. In this admittedly harsh light, Club Dread, the affable 2004 slasher comedy Broken Lizard made in the immediate aftermath of Super Troopers, isn’t just the troupe’s most satisfying follow-up, but a film that reveals a different possible future for the low-brow entertainers.
Club Dread, a fizzy body-count flick set at a Costa Rican beach resort, was meant to show off Broken Lizard’s versatility as sketch comics. Unfortunately, leaning into roles that were “180 from the last movie,” according to Broken Lizard’s Erik Stolhanske, might not have been their most forward-thinking career move. On Club Dread‘s DVD audio commentary, screenwriter Paul Soter suggested that a horror spoof, inspired by cult favorites like The Burning and Terror Train, has a “very niche” appeal and likely “wasn’t the smartest thing to do coming off of Super Troopers.”
Soter added that while Club Dread found its audience on home video, it still only accessed a portion of what he describes as Broken Lizard’s already “limited fan base.” “I wish now we had done something a little more down the middle […] we were asking a lot of our mainstream audience to be down with it. I think horror comedy is hard in general.”
Yet, Soter and the gang’s lightly held affection for slasher tropes accounts for most of the movie’s exceptional appeal. More of a jokey pastiche than a straight-up parody, Club Dread features some of Broken Lizard’s most gut-busting and least self-conscious one-liners—”Let’s at least go inside that old mausoleum!”—and visual gags, like their hilarious homage to Friday The 13th‘s shock scare finale. It also helps that Bill Paxton, who plays the Jimmy Buffett-like resort owner Coconut Pete, delivers the funniest Broken Lizard film performance from a beloved character actor since Super Troopers‘ Brian Cox. (Michael Clarke Duncan comes close as the crazed Mike Tyson-esque restaurant owner in the otherwise uneven Slammin’ Salmon.)
Club Dread rarely devolves into winky cynicism or knowing condescension around its genre’s cliches. Instead of encouraging viewers to laugh at hackneyed conventions, Soter and the gang stretch formulaic scenes until they’re full of surreal flourishes and throwaway gags, like a bonfire horror story about Machete Phil, a dickless killer who may or may not still be hiding on the island.
That shaggy dog routine only ends after Jay Chandrasekhar’s character, the prim tennis instructor Putman, steps on the punchline. But Soter, as Coconut Pete’s snotty nephew Dave, singlehandedly elevates this staid bit when he repeatedly hiss-whispers Machete Phil’s bizarre lament with undisguised relish: “Where’s my penis?” It’s also really funny to see how quickly the killer dispatches Hank (M.C. Gainey’s tough-talking, Quint-like security guard), whose track record as a serial-killer-busting FBI director proves to be completely useless.
Broken Lizard’s refusal to pander to audiences’ post-Super Troopers expectations also makes Club Dread the second-best showcase for their disarming group chemistry. Case in point, Kevin Heffernan plays against viewers’ expectations as Lars, a suspiciously mellow and supernaturally gifted masseur—and a real change-up after Super Troopers‘ hysterical martinet Rod Farva.
What makes Lars so much more endearing than most of Heffernan’s future Farva-adjacent roles is that in Club Dread, he’s a sunny, charismatic lead who doesn’t have to exclusively carry the movie. Rather, Heffernan gets to play the straight man, setting up some of the movie’s funnier jokes, like when Lars fanboys out around Coconut Pete, happily recalling the washed-up resort owner’s past as a proto-Buffett singer-songwriter (“I think you mean ‘Piña Coladaburg’?”) and even joining Pete for a duet version of “Ponytails, Cocktails” (“Two things that will always rock!”).
To be fair, Lars’ fixation with Eastern medicine and therapy techniques also speaks to what keeps Club Dread back from greatness. Jokes about “Feng Chi” and sexually stimulating acupressure points notably fall short, as do most scenes with Juan, Steven Lemme’s stereotypically oversexed Latin lover divemaster. And Putman is simply a one-note joke riffing on the ostensibly amusing clash between his prominent dreadlocks and his wisp of a British accent. All three roles feel less like fully realized characters and more like half-baked suggestions for an improv game designed to impress easily distracted (or less than sober) college kids.
But there’s still something to the troupe’s cohesion that rises to the top. Heffernan’s performance makes the case that Broken Lizard’s greatest quality is their knack for playing off of each other. For proof, see Heffernan scenes with Jenny the aerobics instructor (Brittany Daniel), who develops a strong attraction to Lars after he shows off his massaging skills. Jenny and Lars don’t have the same frenemy attraction that Soter’s horny State Trooper Foster and Marisa Coughlan’s Officer Hanson do in Super Troopers. But that’s partly because Club Dread is first a slasher and then a comedy, so nobody with sex on their minds leaves the movie with a bright romantic future ahead of them. Both performers take their characters’ relationship about as far as they can within the limits of a comedy whose acknowledged influences include the randy 1981 slasher parody Student Bodies. Thankfully, Daniel and Heffernan do have a comic bond that elevates their characters’ light banter and flirtatious rapport, including the scene where they both spit up their drinks on each other.
Heffernan’s spit take—after Daniel says, in character, that “some women are tighter than others”—is also a great example of why Broken Lizard has always been better at clowning around with each other like the Marx brothers instead of subverting expectations with Monty Python-style conceptual humor. In Club Dread, the jokes typically don’t mock the absurdity of the generic situation at hand, but rather involve how funny it is to see this group of goofballs insert themselves into another high-concept scenario.
That focus on group dynamics can be easy to overlook when the comedians in question are so good at delivering their loose, free-associative, and usually scatological jokes that their audience often assumes they’ve improvised everything. (Chandrasekhar told High Times that most of Super Troopers‘ dialogue was scripted, while Soter added that some improvisation was added to the script during rehearsals.) Club Dread‘s characters aren’t as memorable as the troopers, but the film still gave Broken Lizard a great vehicle for their impulsive-seeming shenanigans.
Unfortunately, Club Dread wasn’t a commercial hit in theaters, in part because it opened the same weekend as Mel Gibson’s surprise blockbuster The Passion Of The Christ. (“We got trampled,” Chandrasekhar joked during a Reddit AMA.) Almost everything that Broken Lizard has released in its wake has felt like a diminished return to Super Troopers‘ slobs vs. snobs formula. Only Quasi, their 2023 take on The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (streaming exclusively on Hulu), comes close to having its own identity, and with very mixed results. Club Dread, on the other hand, is both familiar and unique enough to stand on its own. While the group has long since relented to their audience’s expectations, Club Dread reveals a time when they were willing to take their cult comedy crowd for a long, meandering walk.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.