Killer Book Club Review: Spanish ‘Scream’ Fest is a Mediocre Unfeeling Copy of Classic Slashers

Killer Book Club Review: El Club De Los Lectores Criminales is a Spanish horror mystery thriller movie starring Veki Velilla as Angela, Alvaro Mel as Sebas, Ivan Pellicer as Nando, Carlos Alcaide as Rai, Ane Rot as Sara, Hamza Zaidi as Koldo, Maria Cerezuela as Eva and Priscilla Delgado as Virginia, all as part of the titular club in question. Directed by Carlos Alonso Ojea, and written by Carlos Garcia Miranda, the teen slasher received its OTT premiere on Netflix on August 25, 2023.

The movie has a runtime of 89 minutes and is now streaming with English subtitles and dubbed audio. It revolves around a group of 8-horror genre loving friends who are hunted down one by one by a clown killer who also knows the truth about a deadly secret shared between all of them.

El Club De Los Lectores Criminales Review Contains Mild Spoilers

Killer Book Club Review: Discussion

The premise itself will instantly take you back to your old memories of watching the Scream movies and Ryan Murphy’s Scream Queens TV series or even the Final Destination movies, and it’s as simple as it gets. United by their love of horror stories, a group of friends situated in a literature university, with many of them vying to become a great author, are further brought closer by a fatal secret they share.

Once a clown mask wearing serial killer, claiming to know their secret, starts hunting them down while simultaneously penning down an online novel, with each chapter focussed on the death of a book club member, these friends’ anxieties and trust issues take to new heights, and they start distrusting each other as well.

As expected of a horror slasher, it builds up its plot on the basis of the foregrounded cliches of the genre. This time, however, it doesn’t overtly speak of other movies from the same category, but literature instead, which also emerges as an interesting jump point. Let’s get down to the positives of the film first. I really liked how the movie is self aware of the archetypes of the slasher genre, and though it initially mocks them, it further goes on ironically to build its own action on these same fundamental pillars.

The bloody visuals and gore that comes with it is actually quite palpably realistic. Therefore, as far as the visual aesthetic of the dark movie goes, it checks all the boxes and engrossed me with its scary sense of world building to some extent.

Unfortunately, the rest of it all mostly pops up as a hollow follow-up. Veki Velilla is a great “scream queen” and a worthy protagonist for a movie like this as her vulnerability and fear comes up believably. But, her mere heavy lifting isn’t enough to carry the load, especially since the writing is more focussed on the aspect of action and the number of dead bodies piling one after the other.

In many scenes, we encounter more than one death in the passage of barely a few minutes. It rules out the rest of the characters as disposable entities, which they are in most slasher flicks, but this one is not all interested in building them up as human presences in the story.

This redundant inclusion of a long roster of characters further runs a futile errand because their ultimate deaths are also left behind as unfeeling incidents, which are rarely impactful. In a movie like this, where people are mostly dying, the viewers should at least have the inkling of an idea what the person is like, so that we can either root for them or not. Sadly, Killer Book Club never grants us that privilege and passes away its dead characters as dummies in the way of the killer before they finally attack the “heroine”.

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As usual, the mystery is fully unravelled only at the end, with minor details of it being left off in the story early on, but not as significant pieces for us to care about enough. It’s funny how the murderer scoffs at the idea of them having to spell out their purpose and motives for all these killings to the protagonist, and then proceeds to do the same.

And through this move, it’s easy to see that the film also plays out as a parody of sorts for the genre too, knowingly playing around with its stereotypes and foundational elements. So, maybe, it could’ve actually flourished as a full-fledged comical imitation, because the way it is originally, is neither a joke nor impactful.

As for the other two leading actors, Ivan Pellicer’s Nando is a stiff inclusion for the most part of the journey and I couldn’t care less about what his role was, whereas it was a good change of pace to see Alvaro Mel in a slasher right after his recent Netflix romantic series A Perfect Story. However, other than adding the visual star factor to the movie’s ensemble, he doesn’t necessarily rise as a menacing presence in the end.

Adding on to the issue of its plot devices, the whole movie and its characters’ tones imply a great deal about Coulrophobia (the fear of clowns), by tying it up with the overall direction of the story. But in the end, it doesn’t really amount to anything and we’re left wondering about the intentional inclusion of this visual aspect in the film. The final revelation of the mystery plays out well on a minor scale due to its association with something from the past, further highlighting the villain’s motives here, but as mentioned earlier, its execution, especially on the part of the actors’ portrayal isn’t forebodingly convincing enough.

Killer Book Club Netflix Movie: Final Thoughts

The movie isn’t exactly the worst piece of slasher flicks you’ll see out there, but it’s obviously also not the best one. It rather helps cement the argument that making horror pieces is never going to be a right hand task. It brings on a predictable killer that you’ll be able to guess right off the bat even if their motive takes some time to clearly state itself. You can still watch it if you’re interested in witnessing a younger group of people taking the lead in such a movie, but watching the Scream movies will obviously always be the better alternative.

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