Director – Carlos Alfonso Ojea, Screenplay – Carlos Garcia Miranda, Based on the Novel El Club de los Lectores Criminales (2018) by Carlos Garcia Miranda, Producers – Raimon Masllorens, Photography – Pablo Diez, Music – Arnau Bataller, Visual Effects – Miopia VFX (Supervisor – Sonsoles Aranguren & Jose Rossi), Special Effects – Nyumad (Supervisor – Felix Cordon), Makeup Effects – Gorilla Estelar FX, Mad Clown Mask – Hypnotic VFX, Production Design – Markos Keyto. Production Company – Brutal Media.
Cast
Veki Vellila (Angela), Alvaro Mel (Sebas), Ivan Pellicer (Nando), Priscilla Delgado (Virginia), Ane Rot (Sara), Maria Cerezula (Eva), Daniel Grau (Professor Luis Cruzado), Carlos Alcaide (Rai), Hamza Zaidi (Koldo)
Plot
A group of seven friends form a book club at university in Madrid. Angela has doubts about sending her manuscript to her professor Luis Cruzado and decides not to. The next day however, he invites her to his office, having received the manuscript and a message saying she was interested in him. She flees after he tries to force his way with her. The book club friends gather and come up with a plan to punish Cruzado by pursuing him while wearing clown masks. However, this goes wrong and Cruzado falls off the balcony and is impaled on a statue. The group agree to say nothing and the death is dismissed as a suicide. However, someone calling themselves MadClown hijacks the administrator role of the group chat and starts publishing a novel in which each of them has been reduced to an archetype in the story. As each chapter of the novel is published describing their deaths, various members of the group meet these deaths at the hand of the mystery clown figure.
Killer Book Club is a film based on the book El Club de los Lectores Criminales (which translates as The Criminal Readers’ Club in English) (2018) by Spanish writer Carlos Garcia Miranda. Miranda had previously written a Young Adult novel and the SF novel Connected (2016), even a book about Kurt Cobain, as well as a sequel to this with The Criminal Writers’ Club (2022).
It is not long before you realise that Killer Book Club is a variant on I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). In this case, it is a copy that has been rejigged for the Cancel Culture era – one where professor Daniel Grau mistakenly believes Veki Vellila sent an email saying she wants him and comes onto her, whereupon all of her friends in the book club decide the appropriate response is to put on clown masks and terrorise him into … I’m not exactly sure what their intentions were as the plan goes sideways and the professor is killed. They all agree to not talk about it but then find that someone in a clown mask is targeting them.
You are almost immediately switched off the show by its slickly edited presentation. The characters with their designer fashions and perfect model good looks resemble more the cast culled from whatever hip and happening MTV show is hot in Spain at the moment than they do anybody who would normally attend a book club, where attendees are either middle-aged or nerdy bookworm types (in my experience anyway). For that matter, nobody in the book club is actually ever shown doing any reading. Director Carlos Alfonso Ojea uses a lot of slick visual presentation – tv screens everywhere filled with images, blood red lighting schemes.
The book club in session – (clockwise from left) Alvaro Mel, Carlos Alcaide, Ane Rot, Maria Cerezuela and Hamza ZaidiMadClown
Killer Book Club starts to get more interesting in its last half. I did like a scene where the group have to meet the killer at a fairground but where a social media influencer has told all his followers to wear the same clown mask ending with them unable to tell who is the real killer. And of Ane Rot being pursued through the glasshouse by the killer clown figure before making it to the door where Veki Vellila is waiting and being stabbed as she tries to get the glass doors open.
There is a twist ending that at least defies the expectation of this being another I Know What You Did Last Summer plot and becomes an enormous gaslighting revenge scheme. On the other hand, the film never does much to create a substantial plot such that this ever feels like a dramatic pull-the-carpet-out twist at the end.
