Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Killer Book Club’ on Netflix, an Instantly Forgettable Spanish Slasher

Spain churns out Netflix horror movies almost indiscriminately, and the newest slapdash offender is Killer Book Club, a wannabe-cagey self-aware slasher that tries to do something a little different within the pick-’em-off-one-by-one subgenre. There’s certainly room to do new and fresh things within those boundaries, but you’d better be skilled and you’d better be smart and you’d better be sharp with your knowledge of the art of scares and laughs – and this movie, I’m afraid, is none of these things. It is, however, as rote as they come, and here’s why.  

KILLER BOOK CLUB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open with a terrifying scene in which a girl splashes her mother with gasoline and lights a match: FWOOMP. Seems fatal! SIX YEARS LATER, a completely different scene: college kids watching creepy-clown prank videos on the internet. Eight of those kids comprise the local university book club, which gathers in a basement that’s perfect for the type of heavily stylized lighting you only see in horror movies, you know, the type of with pockets of dimness and shards of color to maximize the artificial ATMOSPHERE that tells us the director has a decent eye for aesthetics, one that goes beyond the usual grim blerrghh of so many slasher flicks. 

Anyway, those eight kids are as follows, and for concision’s sake, I’ll include the nicknames given to them by the movie’s clown-masked killer: Angela, the Heroine (Veki Velilla); Nando, the Emo (Ivan Pellicer); Rai, the Wild Man (Carlos Alcaide); Sara, the Babe (Ane Rot), Koldo, the Influencer (Hamza Zaidi); Eva, the Librarian (Maria Cerezuela); Virginia, the Brat (Priscilla Delgado); and Sebas, the Simp (Alvaro Mel). You will be thankful for the nicknames, because they make it easier to tell these twits apart, and they help define character where the screenplay otherwise doesn’t bother to.

One day, Angela is sexually assaulted by her skeevy lit professor, so the book squad gathers up some matching creepy-clown costumes and clawhammers – I was disappointed; I was hoping for some righteously good PEEN-hammer action – to prank him and teach him a lesson. It backfires, as you’d expect, and the guy falls over a railing and, with a sickening SHUNK, ends up impaled on a Don Quixote sculpture. Big whoopsie there. Do you HATE when that HAPPENS? I know I do!

The book clubbers torch the evidence and vow to never, ever, ever, ever, ever (ever) speak of it again, and they live happily ever after, the end. No! Just as their substitute prof delivers a lecture on “autofiction,” their phones chime: Someone posted the first chapter of a story about eight kids who killed a university prof and are trying to cover it up, and that very same author promises to follow with eight chapters detailing each twit’s gruesome and untimely death. The author seems to know quite a bit of secret info about what happened, so they’ve gotta be one of the book clubbers, right? And sure enough, this little endeavor inspires our twitty protagonists to make all sorts of poor choices about hanging out alone in dark places and stuff like that, which makes it easier for the killer to pick them off one by one. And so it’s up to the Heroine to not die, because this movie sure strikes us as one that’ll end with a shot of the Final Girl wrapped in one of those crinkly foil blankets that EMTs give you after you’ve experienced some traumatic horror-movie shit. Not that I’m saying that happens! NO SPOILERS, you know!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I guess this is It meets Scream in one of the gargantuan, $70,000 suburban kitchens belonging to one of the Book Club ladies.

Performance Worth Watching: Velilla is the de-facto lead here, and she ably and dutifully conveys the 1.28 emotions the screenplay gives to her. 

Memorable Dialogue: Eva is an equal-opportunity creator of hypotheses: “Personally, I’d like to believe (the killer is) just some sadistic prick who knows us from school. Or bitch. It could be a girl.”

Sex and Skin: A sex scene in which we almost see a boob and almost see a butt, which is disappointing, but hey, at least the scene is SUMPTUOUSLY lit for maximum faux-eroticism!

Our Take: There’s a scene early in Killer Book Club where Professor Shitbird Grabbyhands pisses all over the concept of fan fiction because it’s rooted in someone else’s idea. I’m not sure if the movie indulges this spiel as an act of self-commentary or self-immolation, or just sets up a challenge for itself, but either way, it doesn’t really work. The film maybe wants to pay homage to its influences, but doesn’t do so with enough specificity to render it anything more than just another neo-slasher among too many such things. One gets the sense that the movie thinks it’s quite clever as it stacks up third-act twists like so much cordwood, and to be fair, it is a bit difficult to predict what happens, but that’s because it’s too complicated for its own good, and considers logic to be something that burdens other movies – that one character was only lightly disemboweled, it seems.

Those would-be clever strokes don’t apply to the bromidic dialogue or flimsy characters, neither of which stick to the memory or provide anything resembling an emotional handhold (I scoff in the face of the Simp-Heroine-Emo love triangle: HA, I say, HA. I am not invested in the well-being of your petty hearts!). These characters are too generic to even be familiar types, and don’t even give the actors any cliches to lean into. They’re just tools of the plot, which needs to be exceptional in order to transcend those flaws – and it’s far from exceptional. Even the kills are rote, and if a horror movie needs something to tickle the cockles of you gore junkies out there (you know who you are), it’s some sick KILLS, bro. Director Carlos Alonso Ojea tries to compensate for the film’s many shortcomings with some capital-S Style, but without satisfying our hearts or minds (or bloodlust), Killer Book Club is just another brutal mediocrity among many.

Our Call: Pitch Killer Book Club into the remainder pile. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.