Spoilers will skip to the ending.

A great execution is what saves a derivative film from becoming a cliche. You can be inspired by previous works and classic concepts without being derivative, originality can come through presentation, angles, cinematography, storytelling, setting and a myriad of small details but even without or with everything on top, how the audience experiences the film is critical to its success. That means, sometimes it just doesn’t work. Hand me the scalpel, please…

Killer Book Club (2023) was directed by Carlos Alonso Ojea and written by Carlos García Miranda. A group of university friends have a book club in which they specialize in the horror genre. The only one amongst them that has ever published something is Angela (Veki Velilla) who wrote a book when she was younger and hasn’t written anything since. She has dragged her boyfriend Nando (Iván Pellicer) into the club, although he’s not taking classes with them. The leader of the book club Sebas (Álvaro Mel) has allowed it, presumably because he has a crush on Angela. There are other members of the club, and they do get introduced to you. Literally their name shows up in the screen as we meet them, along with the description of their character. This succeeds in making them completely forgettable.

It doesn’t help that a lot of the scenes are filmed less than bright colors. When all the characters end up dressing up as clowns to scare a teacher that came on to Angela, you can already tell this prank is about to go wrong. I also couldn’t help seeing the entire cast looking like identical clowns be an unintended description of the film. Anyhow, they end up running into innocent bystander Virginia (Priscilla Delgado) and recruiting them just so she won’t report them (err, did they just happen to bring an extra clown costume?). The prank ends up going wrong, the teacher gets killed and they swear nobody will never know what they did last summer. Yeah, I wanted to scream. Taking stuff from better movies without adding something of your own is just lowering the bar.

You have a book club. Why not nickname the characters after famous horror authors? Okey, perhaps nobody reads these days.. Better yet, make it a horror movie club as you really seem drawn to do, given you’re using stuff taken from horror movies. Then you can nickname all as famous horror movie directors. That would work wonders with making these characters a lot more engaging (and memorable). Instead, we have… say one influencer named Koldo (Hamza Zaidi) that only sticks out because he’s the classical guy who ruins everything for getting followers. It’s being done. It’s also got that “unexpected” second reveal that will literally have you thinking, WTF is this character again?

It doesn’t work. My biggest peeve is you have all these characters speaking Spanish and then you show the overlay of social networking in English. That broke me out of my suspension of disbelief which was already eggshell-thin. But then you have zero character development and you can guess out who the murderer is/are well within the first act or two. Not that it matters, we’re adding the usual supernatural behind-the-scenes teleporting ability plus omniscience that plagues other slasher films. There’s zero horror/thrill or even entertainment in the film. None of the characters are relatable or engaging enough to become invested in their plight. You don’t care enough for anybody to live, or hate anybody enough to rejoice on their demise.

Not recommended. It’s a derivative premise that doesn’t use any of the material it borrows to bring any entertainment value. It never builds momentum, or scary moments, or empathy, or interest for any of its cast. There’s not even a single jumpscare that works in the entire runtime. Fortunately it’s Netflix so you can switch to something else. Not worth watching ever, not even as a fun “bad” movie since it just doesn’t even have a fun dialog to laugh to.

That will do for now.